Oops, I Did it Again: Mitigating Repeated Access Control Errors on Facebook
Serge Egelman, Andrew Oates, Shriram Krishnamurthi
SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2011
Abstract
We performed a study of current Facebook users to examine how they coped with limitations of the Facebook privacy settings interface. Students graduating and joining the workforce create significant problems for all but the most basic privacy settings on social networking websites. We therefore created realistic scenarios that required users to specify access control policies that were impossible due to various limitations. We examined whether users were aware of these problems without being prompted, and once given feedback, what their coping strategies were. Overall, we found that simply alerting participants to potential errors was ineffective, but when choices were also presented, participants introduced significantly fewer errors. Based on our findings, we designed a privacy settings interface based on Venn diagrams, which we validated with a usability study. We conclude that this interface may be more effective than the current privacy settings interface.
Paper
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