Visible Flows: Contextual Integrity and the Design of Privacy Mechanisms on Social Network Sites

Social Network Sites have a number of well publicized privacy issues stemming from the over disclosure of personal information. On one hand, users seem oblivious to their privacy, doing little to protect their personal data. On the other hand, there have been a number of privacy uproars and backlashes due to certain site features or behaviors. In this paper, we explore the privacy issues in social network sites using contextual integrity, a recently proposed privacy framework. We use the framework to highlight a number of privacy issues on social network sites, and to propose a set of design guidelines and potential solutions.