Predicting privacy settings with a user-centered approach

People are connecting and sharing large amounts of personal information through social media sites, cloud and health services, and other online applications. Users often manage their interactions and information disclosures on these sites using a variety of privacy settings. The use of privacy settings on social networking sites (SNS) such as Facebook has been extensively studied. Researchers have found that users have many friends and desire to selectively share with multiple audiences. However, users struggle to manage their privacy settings as they are quite complex and the structure of the settings changes frequently. As a result, users can share information more broadly than intended, even within the “friend” group, resulting in embarrassment or regret. Rather than adjust confusing privacy settings, users may resort to various coping mechanisms such as censoring their disclosures.