User Awareness of Binary Privacy Settings
This blog is a summary of the paper ‘Twitter has a Binary Privacy Setting, are Users Aware of How It Works?’ where we research the user understanding of privacy settings in various scenarios on Twitter.
Key Takeaways
- Individual account visibility is understood well by users.
- Interactions are much less clear, especially when accounts with restricted visibility interact.
- Users who utilize privacy settings do not have better knowledge about account and post visibilities.
Privacy settings and default settings — different platforms different rules
Social media users are given a range of privacy settings by the platforms. However, there is no standart to these settings where every platform create their own. Users have to keep up with these settings to protect their privacy. It is not surprising that users tend to keep the defaults given by the platforms which are usually not very restrictive.
Some platforms have really detailed privacy settings while some others have very simplistic ones. We know that detailed privacy settings are not very easy to understand and effectively use, what about simpler settings? Twitter/X has very simplistic binary privacy setting that apply to the whole account when set.
A quick disclaimer: This research was conducted in 2021 where the platform was named Twitter. The settings mentioned in the paper reflect that timeframe where Twitter Circle was not yet introduced to the platform.
Some visibility rules on Twitter
- Public accounts’ tweets can be seen by anyone on Internet while protected accounts’ tweets are only shown to followers of the said account.
- The settings apply to the whole account and when changed previously protected tweets can be seen by anyone.
- The tweet visibility depend on the tweeter which means the replies to a protected accounts’ tweets can be seen by anyone if the replier has a public account.
We conducted a survey with users to investigate (1) the general user understanding, (2) the effect of privacy settings usage to privacy understanding, (3) other factors that could impact understanding. We know that some Twitter users utilize the privacy settings more than others, even to the extent of changing daily. That is why we recruited people with public and protected account, as well as ones who switch.
We found that an account visibility by itself is understood fairly well by users. However, the visibility of tweets are not clear for users when a protected account interacts with other accounts. Surprisingly, understanding of users with protected or switching accounts is not better that users with public accounts. We find that users that interact with protected accounts have better understanding. Users who use other social media platforms also have better understanding of account and tweet visibility on Twitter.
We suggest that showing potential audience while drafting a post in social media platforms would decrease the unintended privacy leaks. We know that interactions with other accounts can cause privacy violations. Users should be informed clearly when they are interacting with other accounts and the implications of the actions.
The full paper can be accessed here. This work is going to be presented at The 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work And Social Computing.
