Privacy Preferences vs. Privacy Settings: An Exploratory Facebook Study

Attacks on confidential data on the Internet is increasing. The reachability to users' data needs stricter control. One way to do this by the user is applying proper privacy settings. Research finds there is slackness in online users' applying proper privacy settings but no such work has focused on the reasons behind the slackness behavior. Our work aimed at studying user slackness behavior and investigating the human factors involved on such behavior. We evaluated the extent to which FB users' privacy settings match their privacy preferences, whether FB user privacy setting behavior is dependent on age, gender, or education demographics, and the effectiveness of FB's privacy settings. Our results validated user slackness in privacy settings and suggested a significant association between the age categories and the privacy settings behavior. The results also suggested that FB's privacy settings system is not effective for its diverse demographic user base.