How do Facebookers Use Friendlists

Facebook friend lists are used to classify friends into groups and assist users in controlling access to their information. In this paper, we study the effectiveness of Facebook friend lists from two aspects: Friend Management and Policy Patterns by examining how users build friend lists and to what extent they use them in their policy templates. We have collected real Facebook profile information and photo privacy policies of 222 participants, through their consent in our Facebook survey application posted on Mechanical Turk. Our data analysis shows that users´ customized friend lists are less frequently created and have fewer overlaps as compared to Facebook created friend lists. Also, users do not place all of their friends into lists. Moreover, friends in more than one friend lists have higher values of node betweenness and outgoing to incoming edge ratio values among all the friends of a particular user. Last but not the least, friend list and user based exceptions are less frequently used in policies as compared to allowing all friends, friends of friends and everyone to view photos.