Revealing Cumulative Risks in Online Personal Information: A Data Narrative Study

When pieces from an individual’s personal information available online are connected over time and across multiple platforms, this more complete digital trace can give unintended insights into their life and opinions. In a data narrative interview study with 26 currently employed participants, we examined risks and harms to individuals and employers when others joined the dots between their online information. We discuss the themes of visibility and self-disclosure, unintentional information leakage and digital privacy literacies constructed from our analysis. We contribute insights not only into people’s difficulties in recalling and conceptualising their digital traces but of subsequently envisioning how their online information may be combined, or (re)identified across their traces and address a current gap in research by showing that awareness is lacking around the potential for personal information to be correlatedby and made coherent to/by others, posing risks to individuals, employers, and even the state. We touch on inequalities of privacy, freedom and legitimacy that exist for different groups with regard to what they make (or feel compelled to make) available online and we contribute to current methodological work on the use of sketching to support visual sense making in data narrative interviews. We conclude by discussing the need for interventions that support personal reflection on the potential visibility of combined digital traces to spotlight hidden vulnerabilities, and promote more proactive action about what is shared and not shared online

Revealing cumulative risks in online personal information : a data narrative study

When pieces from an individual's personal information available online are connected over time and across multiple platforms, this more complete digital trace can give unintended insights into their life and opinions. In a data narrative interview study with 26 currently employed participants, we examined risks and harms to individuals and employers when others joined the dots between their online information. We discuss the themes of visibility and self-disclosure, unintentional information leakage and digital privacy literacies constructed from our analysis. We contribute insights not only into people's difficulties in recalling and conceptualising their digital traces but of subsequently envisioning how their online information may be combined, or (re)identified across their traces and address a current gap in research by showing that awareness is lacking around the potential for personal information to be correlated by and made coherent to/by others, posing risks to individuals, employers, and even the state. We touch on inequalities of privacy, freedom and legitimacy that exist for different groups with regard to what they make (or feel compelled to make) available online and we contribute to current methodological work on the use of sketching to support visual sense making in data narrative interviews. We conclude by discussing the need for interventions that support personal reflection on the potential visibility of combined digital traces to spotlight hidden vulnerabilities, and promote more proactive action about what is shared and not shared online

Comunicar en 140 caracteres. ¿Cómo usan Twitter los comunicadores en España?

La presente tesis doctoral analiza cómo usan Twitter los comunicadores españoles. Inicia dando un repaso a los grandes teóricos de las redes sociales y a la abundante bibliografía generada en los últimos años sobre la relación entre microblogging, comunicación, participación ciudadana y regulaciones en los medios. En su segunda parte, estudia una muestra de casi 5 millones de tuits correspondientes a 1504 comunicadores de 16 periódicos y los somete al impacto de 40 variables con el fin de medir la actividad e influencia de las cuentas, describir sus constantes y conocer sus relaciones con los textos impresos. El análisis constata que el uso de Twitter es menor del esperado, a pesar de tratarse de una plataforma que ha sido muy bien acogida en la profesión, y pone en evidencia la existencia de un Twitter a dos velocidades: un grupo reducido de cuentas de comunicadores presentan cifras de vértigo y gozan de una enorme influencia en la red, mientras que el resto de las cuentas, la mayoría, presentan valores mucho más modestos, solo ligeramente por encima de los valores de los usuarios medios. Sin embargo, ambos grupos comparten una característica común: la interacción con los seguidores es prácticamente nula. Salvo excepciones, unos y otros establecen relaciones muy endogámicas, respondiendo a colegas, retuiteando a colegas, mencionando a colegas y desaprovechando las potencialidades multidireccionales que ofrece esta plataforma

Analysis of Privacy in Online Social Networks of Runet

In recent years, social networking sites (SNSs) gained high popularity among Internet users as they combine the best of both worlds: befriending people outside real life situations and staying in touch with people already known. An important aspect of any SNS is user profiles, which allow users to virtually publish anything about themselves, including highly personal or sensitive information. With the inception of SNSs, the problem of personal information disclosure and privacy implications has turned into a serious issue. While privacy issues in SNSs have been extensively analyzed in the past five years showcasing flagships of “western ” SNSs like Facebook and MySpace, SNSs that target mainly Russian speaking audiences are not yet analyzed and demand investigation. The goals of this paper are twofold: (1) to raise the awareness of the public to the problems of information revelation by studying the amount and type of information disclosed by users of Runet (Russian Segment of the Internet) SNSs (2) to compare our findings to the results of previous studies in the context of “western ” SNSs. We investigate different aspects of information revelation of more than 30 million user profiles collected from five Runet SNSs considered in this paper. In addition, we conducted a survey among a Russian speaking population to assess both the level of awareness of the privacy issues and the level of trust, and compared the results to previous studies. While the results indicate that Runet users tend to disclose less information and are more concerned about privacy implications, there is still a substantial gap between western and Runet SNS providers in understanding of privacy implications and implementation of security measures, which leads to exposure of extensive amounts of personal information