Factors influencing the use of privacy settings in location-based social networks

The growth of location-based social networks (LBSN) such as Facebook and Twitter has been rapid in recent years. In LBSNs, users provide location information on public profiles that potentially can be used in harmful ways. LBSNs have privacy settings that allow users to control the privacy level of their profiles, thus limiting access to location information by other users; but for various reasons users seldom make use of them. Using the protection motivation theory (PMT) as a theoretical lens, this dissertation examines whether users can be encouraged to use LBSN privacy settings through fear appeals. Fear appeals have been used in various studies to arouse fear in users, in order to motivate them to comply to an adaptive behaviour through the threat of impending danger. However, within the context of social networking, it is not yet clear how fear-inducing arguments will ultimately influence the use of privacy settings by users. The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of fear appeals on user compliance, with recommendations to enact the use of privacy settings toward the alleviation of privacy threats. Using a survey methodology, 248 social-network users completed an instrument measuring the variables conceptualized by PMT. Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) was used to test the validity and reliability, and to analyze the data. Analysis of the responses show that PMT provides an explanation for the intention to use privacy settings by social-network users. Risk susceptibility, response efficacy, self-efficacy and response cost were found to have a positive impact on the intention to use privacy settings, while sharing benefits and maladaptive behaviours were found to have a negative impact on the intention to use privacy settings. However, risk severity and fear were not found to be significant predictors of the intention to use privacy settings. This study contributes to existing research on PMT in a sense that fear appeal should focus more on coping appraisal, rather than on threat appraisal which is consistent with the results of most studies on protection motivation

Smartphones

Many of the research approaches to smartphones actually regard them as more or less transparent points of access to other kinds of communication experiences. That is, rather than considering the smartphone as something in itself, the researchers look at how individuals use the smartphone for their communicative purposes, whether these be talking, surfing the web, using on-line data access for off-site data sources, downloading or uploading materials, or any kind of interaction with social media. They focus not so much on the smartphone itself but on the activities that people engage in with their smartphones

Integrated context-aware and cloud-based adaptive home screens for android phones

This is the post-print version of this Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2011 Springer VerlagThe home screen in Android phones is a highly customizable user interface where the users can add and remove widgets and icons for launching applications. This customization is currently done on the mobile device itself and will only create static content. Our work takes the concept of Android home screen [3] one step further and adds flexibility to the user interface by making it context-aware and integrated with the cloud. Overall results indicated that the users have a strong positive bias towards the application and that the adaptation helped them to tailor the device to their needs by using the different context aware mechanisms

Regrets, I\u27ve Had a Few: When Regretful Experiences Do (and Don\u27t) Compel Users to Leave Facebook

Previous work has explored regretful experiences on social media. In parallel, scholars have examined how people do not use social media. This paper aims to synthesize these two research areas and asks: Do regretful experiences on social media influence people to (consider) not using social media? How might this influence differ for different sorts of regretful experiences? We adopted a mixed methods approach, combining topic modeling, logistic regressions, and contingency analysis to analyze data from a web survey with a demographically representative sample of US internet users (n=515) focusing on their Facebook use. We found that experiences that arise because of users\u27 own actions influence actual deactivation of their Facebook account, while experiences that arise because of others\u27 actions lead to considerations of non-use. We discuss the implications of these findings for two theoretical areas of interest in HCI: individual agency in social media use and the networked dimensions of privacy

Networked Individualism of Urban Residents: Discovering the Communicative Ecology in Inner-City Apartment Buildings

Certain patterns of interaction between people point to networks as an adequate conceptual model to characterise some aspects of social relationships mediated or facilitated by information and communication technology. Wellman proposes a shift from groups to networks and describes the ambivalent nature inherent in an ego-centric yet still well-connected portfolio of sociability with the term ‘networked individualism’. In this paper we use qualitative data from an action research study of social networks of residents in three inner-city apartment buildings in Australia to provide empirical grounding for the theoretical concept of networked individualism. However, this model focuses on network interaction rather than collective interaction. We propose ‘communicative ecology’ as a concept which integrates the three dimensions of "online and offline", "global and local" as well as "collective and networked". We present our research on three layers of interpretation (technical, social and discursive) to deliver a rich description of the communicative ecology we found, that is, the way residents negotiate membership, trust, privacy, reciprocity, permeability and social roles in person-to-person mediated and direct relationships. We find that residents seamlessly traverse between online and offline communication; local communication and interaction maintains a more prominent position than global or geographically dispersed communication; and residents follow a dual approach which allows them to switch between collective and networked interaction depending on purpose and context

Using Metrics Suites to Improve the Measurement of Privacy in Graphs

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.Social graphs are widely used in research (e.g., epidemiology) and business (e.g., recommender systems). However, sharing these graphs poses privacy risks because they contain sensitive information about individuals. Graph anonymization techniques aim to protect individual users in a graph, while graph de-anonymization aims to re-identify users. The effectiveness of anonymization and de-anonymization algorithms is usually evaluated with privacy metrics. However, it is unclear how strong existing privacy metrics are when they are used in graph privacy. In this paper, we study 26 privacy metrics for graph anonymization and de-anonymization and evaluate their strength in terms of three criteria: monotonicity indicates whether the metric indicates lower privacy for stronger adversaries; for within-scenario comparisons, evenness indicates whether metric values are spread evenly; and for between-scenario comparisons, shared value range indicates whether metrics use a consistent value range across scenarios. Our extensive experiments indicate that no single metric fulfills all three criteria perfectly. We therefore use methods from multi-criteria decision analysis to aggregate multiple metrics in a metrics suite, and we show that these metrics suites improve monotonicity compared to the best individual metric. This important result enables more monotonic, and thus more accurate, evaluations of new graph anonymization and de-anonymization algorithms

Mapping the Bid Behavior of Conference Referees

The peer-review process, in its present form, has been repeatedly criticized. Of the many critiques ranging from publication delays to referee bias, this paper will focus specifically on the issue of how submitted manuscripts are distributed to qualified referees. Unqualified referees, without the proper knowledge of a manuscript's domain, may reject a perfectly valid study or potentially more damaging, unknowingly accept a faulty or fraudulent result. In this paper, referee competence is analyzed with respect to referee bid data collected from the 2005 Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL). The analysis of the referee bid behavior provides a validation of the intuition that referees are bidding on conference submissions with regards to the subject domain of the submission. Unfortunately, this relationship is not strong and therefore suggests that there exists other factors beyond subject domain that may be influencing referees to bid for particular submissions