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uCl: 10.3778/!LlS.2014.23.Clarke.1



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EAP 1
Privacy and Social Media: An Analytical Framework
ROGER CLARKE
*

Abstract
Social media services offer users tools for interaction, publishing and sharing, but in
return demand exposure of users' selves and of personal information about the
members of their social networks. The Terms of Service imposed by providers are
uniformly privacy-hostile. The practice of social media exhibits a great many distrust
influencers, and some are sufficiently strong that they constitute distrust drivers.
This paper presents an analytical framework whereby designers of social media
services can overcome user distrust and inculcate user trust.
Introduction
Social media is a collective term for a range of services that support users in
exchanging content and pointers to content, but in ways that are
advantageous to the service-provider. These services emerged in conjunction
with the Web 2.0 and social networking notions, during 2004-05.
1

As shown by Best
2
and Clarke,
3
there was little terminological clarity or
coherence about Web 2.0. Similarly, an understanding of what social media
encompasses remains somewhat rubbery, eg Kaplan and Haenlein define
social media as a group of Internet-based applications that build on the
ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the
creation and exchange of User Generated Content.
4
Those authors did,

*
Principal, Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd, Canberra; Visiting Professor, UNSW Law,
University of NSW, Sydney; Visiting Professor, Research School of Computer
Science, ANU, Canberra.
1
T OReilly, What Is Web 2.0? Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next
Generation of Software on OReilly, (30 September 2005)
<http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/6228>.
2
D Best, Web 2.0: Next Big Thing or Next Big Internet Bubble? (January, 2006) Lecture
Web Information Systems, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven,
<http://www.scribd.com/doc/4635236/Web-2-0>.
3
R Clarke, Web 2.0 as Syndication (August 2008) 3(2) Journal of Theoretical and
Applied Electronic Commerce Research 30
<http://www.jtaer.com/portada.php?agno=2008&numero=2#>.
Preprint at <http://www.rogerclarke.com/EC/Web2C.html>.
4
A M Kaplan and M Haenlein, Users of the world, unite! The challenges and
opportunities of social media (Jan-Feb 2010) 53(1) Business Horizons 59, 61. DOI:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.bushor.2009.09.003.
Journal of Law, Information and Science Vol 23(1) 2014
EAP 2
however, apply theories in the field of media research (social presence, media
richness) and social processes (self-presentation, self-disclosure), in order to
propose the classification scheme in Table 1.
Social network analysis is a well-established approach to modelling actors
and the ties or linkages among them. It generally emphasises the importance
of the linkages, and underplays or even ignores the attributes of the actors
and other aspects of the context within which each actor operates.
5
Various
forms of graphing and inferencing techniques have been harnessed by social
media service-providers. In a social media context, networks may be based on
explicit linkages such as bookmarking, friending, following, liking/+1
and endorsing, on communications linkages such as email and chat messages,
or on implicit linkages such as tagging, visiting the same sites, purchasing the
same books, etc.
Social presence/Media richness
Low Medium High
Self-
presentation/
Self-
disclosure
High Blogs
Social networking
sites (eg Facebook)
Virtual social worlds
(eg Second Life)
Low
Collaborative
projects
(eg Wikipedia)
Content Communities
(eg YouTube)
Virtual game worlds
(eg World of Warcraft)
Table 1: Kaplan and Haenleins Classification of Social Media
The motivation for social media services-providers is to attract greater traffic
on their sites. They therefore actively seek network effects
6
based on positive
feedback loops, preferably of the extreme variety referred to as bandwagon
effects. These depend on the generation of excitement, and the promotion of
activities of individuals to large numbers of other individuals, based on both
established linkages and inferred affinities. An important element of
commercially successful social media is the encouragement of exhibitionism
by a critical mass of users, in order to stimulate voyeuristic behaviour (in the
sense of gratification through observation) by many users. For the provider,
exhibitionism of self is useful, but the exposure of others is arguably even
more valuable.
7


5
E Otte and R Rousseau, Social network analysis: a powerful strategy, also for the
information sciences (2002) 28(6) Journal of Information Science 441
<http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.95.3227&rep=rep1&t
ype=pdf>. Doi: 10.1177/016555150202800601.
6
M L Katz and C Shapiro, Systems Competition and Network Effects (Spring 1994)
8(2) Journal of Economic Perspectives 93 <http://brousseau.info/pdf/cours/Katz-
Shapiro%5B1994%5D.pdf>.
7
A A Adams, Facebook Code: SNS Platform Affordances and Privacy (2014) 23(1)
Journal of Law, Information and Science.
Privacy and Social Media: An Analytical Framework
EAP 3
Another insight from social network theory is that links among content-items
are important to providers not so much because they provide a customer
service, but because they support social linkages.
8
The major social media
services place much less emphasis on enabling close management of groups
such as cliques (tightly-knit groups) and social circles (looser groups),
because activity within small sub-nets serves the providers interests far less
well than open activity. This has significant negative implications for the
privacy of the many individuals who participate in social circles or cliques
whose norm is to respect the confidentiality of transactions occurring within
those groups.
Consumer marketing companies generally perceive the need to convey
corporate image and messages, shape consumer opinions, and build purchase
momentum; and social media has been harnessed to those purposes. The
Kaplan and Haenlein classification scheme is a good fit to the perspectives of
both service-providers and consumer-facing corporations. On the other hand,
through its commitment to the consumer as prey tradition,
9
the scheme fails
to reflect the interests of the users who social media services exploit. A
classification scheme would better serve users of social media if it focussed on
its features and affordances in the areas of human interaction, content
broadcast and content collaboration.
10

Social media services offer varying mixes of features. These can be classified
as:
11

interaction tools (eg email, chat/IM, SMS, voice and video-
conferencing);
broadcast tools (eg web-pages and their closed equivalent of wall-
postings, blogs, micro-blogs, content communities for images, videos
and slide-sets, and locations); and
sharing tools (eg wikis, social bookmarking, approvals and
disapprovals, social gaming).

8
J Hendler and J Golbeck, Metcalfes law, Web 2.0, and the Semantic Web (2008)
6(1) Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web 14 <
http://smtp.websemanticsjournal.org/index.php/ps/article/download/130/128
>. Doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.websem.2007.11.008.
9
R Clarke, Trust in the Context of e-Business (February 2002) 4(5) Internet Law
Bulletin 56 <http://www.rogerclarke.com/EC/Trust.html; R Clarke, B2C Distrust
Factors in the Prosumer Era (keynote paper presented at CollECTeR Iberoamerica,
Madrid, 25-28 June 2008) 1-12,
<http://www.rogerclarke.com/EC/Collecter08.html>; J Deighton J and L
Kornfeld, Interactivitys Unanticipated Consequences for Marketers and
Marketing (2009) 23(1) Journal of Interactive Marketing 4.
10
R Clarke, Consumer-Oriented Social Media: The Identification of Key Characteristics
(January 2013) Xamax Consultancy,
<http://www.rogerclarke.com/II/COSM-1301.html>.
11
Ibid.
Journal of Law, Information and Science Vol 23(1) 2014
EAP 4
A review of social media services since 2000 identifies waves that have been
centred on, successively, blogs (eg Wordpress, Blogspot, LiveJournal), voice-
calls (Skype), social gaming (Friendster, Zynga), virtual worlds (Second Life),
social bookmarking (Delicious), approvals (Digg, Reddit), video communities
(YouTube, Vine), image communities (Flickr, Picasa, Instagram, Pinterest),
social networking (Plaxo, LinkedIn, Xing, Orkut, Facebook, Buzz, Google+),
micro-blogs (Twitter, Tumblr), location (Foursquare, Latitude) and back to
messaging (WhatsApp, Snapchat). Some social media services have proven to
be short-lived fads. Some appear to be instances of longer-lived genres,
although, even in these cases, waves of differently-conceived services have
been crashing over one another in quick succession. Some aspects may
mature into long-term features of future services, because they satisfy a
deeper human need rather than just a fashion-driven desire.
Consumers hedonistic desires may be well-served by contemporary social
media services. On the other hand, a proportion of users understand that they
are being exploited by social media service-providers. The boldness and even
arrogance of many of those providers has given rise to a growing body of
utterances by influential commentators, which has caused a lot more users to
become aware of the extent of the exploitation.
12
Consumer and privacy
concerns are legion. Combined with other factors, these concerns are giving
rise to doubts about whether sufficient trust exists for the first decades
momentum in social media usage to be sustained.
13

Privacy has long loomed as a strategic factor for both corporations and
government agencies.
14
Despite this, social media services that are committed

12
S M Petersen, Loser Generated Content: From Participation to Exploitation
(March 2008) 13(3) First Monday
<http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2141/1948>;
R OConnor, Facebook is Not Your Friend (15 April 2012) Huffington Post
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rory-oconnor/facebook-
privacy_b_1426807.html>; P J Rey, Alienation, Exploitation, and Social Media
(April 2012) 56(4) American Behavioral Scientist 399.
13
G Marks, Why Facebook Is In Decline (19 August 2013) Forbes,
<http://www.forbes.com/sites/quickerbettertech/2013/08/19/why-facebook-is-
in-decline/>; R Cormack, The Decline of Facebook (24 September 2013) Social Media
Frontiers, <http://www.socialmediafrontiers.com/2013/09/social-media-news-
decline-of-facebook.html>.
14
D Peppers and M Rogers, The One to One Future: Building Relationships One
Customer at a Time (Doubleday, 1993); R Clarke, Privacy, Dataveillance,
Organisational Strategy (keynote address, I S Audit and Control Association
Conference (ISACA/EDPAC 96), Perth, 28 May 1996)
<http://www.rogerclarke.com/DV/PStrat.html>; R Levine, C Locke, D Searls and
D Weinberger, The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business As Usual (Perseus Books,
1999); A Cavoukian and T Hamilton, The Privacy Payoff: How Successful Businesses
Build Consumer Trust (McGraw-Hill Ryerson Trade, 2002); R Clarke, Make Privacy
a Strategic Factor - The Why and the How (October 2006) 19(11) Cutter IT Journal
<http://www.rogerclarke.com/DV/APBD-0609.html>.
Privacy and Social Media: An Analytical Framework
EAP 5
to privacy-friendliness have been conspicuous by their absence. Attempts at
consumer-oriented social media, such as Diaspora, duuit, Gnu social and
Open Social, have all faltered. Snapchat nominally supports ephemeral (view
once) messaging, but it has been subject to a formal complaint that its
published claims are constructively misleading.
15

I have suggested elsewhere that the long wait for the emergence of the
prosumer may be coming to a close.
16
That term was coined by Toffler in
1980, to refer to a phenomenon he had presaged 10 years earlier.
17
The
concept was revisited in Tapscott and Williams,
18
applied in Brown and
Marsden,
19
and has been extended to the notion of produser in Bruns.
20
A
prosumer is a consumer who is proactive (eg is demanding, and expects
interactivity with the producer) and/or a producer as well as a consumer (eg
one who expects to be able to exploit digital content for mashups). To the
extent that a sufficient proportion of consumers do indeed mature into
prosumers, consumer dissatisfaction with untrustworthy social media
service-providers can be expected to rise, and to influence consumers choices.
The need therefore exists for means whereby the most serious privacy
problems can be identified, and ways can be devised to overcome them. This
paper commences with a review of the nature of privacy, followed by
application of the core ideas to social media. The notion of trust is then
considered, and operational definitions are proposed for a family of concepts.
Implications for social media design are drawn from that analytical
framework, including constructive proposals for addressing privacy
problems to the benefit of consumers and service-providers alike. Research
opportunities arising from the analysis are identified.
1 Privacy and Social Media
This section commences by summarising key aspects of privacy. It then
applies them to social media.

15
J Guynn, Privacy watchdog EPIC files complaint against Snapchat with FTC, Los
Angeles Times (17 May 2013) <http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-
fi-tn-privacy-watchdog-epic-files-complaint-against-snapchat-with-ftc-
20130517,0,3618395.story#axzz2krJ3636V>.
16
Clarke, B2C Distrust Factors in the Prosumer Era, above n 9.
17
A Toffler, Future Shock (Pan, 1970) 240-258; A Toffler, The Third Wave (Pan, 1980)
275-299, 355-356, 366, 397-399.
18
D Tapscott and A D Williams, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes
Everything (Portfolio, 2006).
19
I Brown and C T Marsden, Regulating Code (MIT Press, 2013).
20
A Bruns, From Prosumer to Produser: Understanding User-Led Content Creation (paper
presented at Transforming Audiences, London, 3-4 September, 2009).
Journal of Law, Information and Science Vol 23(1) 2014
EAP 6
1.1 Privacy
Privacy is a multi-dimensional construct rather than a concept, and hence
definitions are inevitably contentious. Many of the conventional approaches
are unrealistic, serve the needs of powerful organisations rather than those of
individuals, or are of limited value as a means of guiding operational
decisions. Other treatments include those of Schoeman,
21
Hirshleifer,
22

Lindsay
23
and Nissenbaum.
24

The approach adopted here is to adopt a definition of privacy as an interest,
to retain its positioning as a human right, to reject the attempts on behalf of
business interests to reduce it to a mere economic right,
25
and to supplement
the basic definition with a discussion of the multiple dimensions inherent in
the construct.
The following definition is of long standing:
26

Privacy is the interest that individuals have in sustaining a personal space,
free from interference by other people and organisations.
A weakness in discussions of privacy throughout the world is the limitation
of the scope to data protection/Datenschutz. It is vital to recognise that
privacy is a far broader notion than that. The four-dimensional scheme below

21
F D Schoeman (ed), Philosophical Dimensions of Privacy: An Anthology (Cambridge
University Press, 1984).
22
J Hirshleifer, Privacy: Its Origin, Function and Future (1980) 9(4) Journal of Legal
Studies 649.
23
D Lindsay, An Exploration of the Conceptual Basis of Privacy and the
Implications for the Future of Australian Privacy Law (2005) 29(1) Melbourne
University Law Review 131.
24
H Nissenbaum, Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life
(Stanford University Press, 2009).
25
R A Posner, The Economics of Privacy (May 1981) 71(2) American Economic Review
405; A Acquisti, Privacy in Electronic Commerce and the Economics of Immediate
Gratificatio (Proceedings of the ACM Electronic Commerce Conference (EC 04)
New York, 21-29 <http://www.heinz.cmu.edu/~acquisti/papers/privacy-
gratification.pdf>.
26
W L Morison, Report on the Law of Privacy (Government Printer, 1973); Clarke,
Privacy, Dataveillance, Organisational Strategy, above n 14; R Clarke, Introduction
to Dataveillance and Information Privacy, and Definitions of Terms (August 1997)
Xamax Consultancy <http://www.rogerclarke.com/DV/Intro.html>; R Clarke,
Whats Privacy? Submission to the Australian Law Reform Commission (July 2006)
Xamax Consultancy <http://www.rogerclarke.com/DV/Privacy.html>.
Privacy and Social Media: An Analytical Framework
EAP 7
has been in consistent use since at least 1996,
27
and a fifth dimension is
tentatively added at the end of the discussion.
(1) Privacy of the person
This is concerned with the integrity of the individuals body. At its broadest,
it extends to freedom from torture and the right to medical treatment. Issues
include compulsory immunisation, imposed treatments such as lobotomy and
sterilisation, blood transfusion without consent, compulsory provision of
samples of body fluids and body tissue, requirements for submission to
biometric measurement, and, significantly for social media, risks to personal
safety arising from physical, communications or data surveillance, or location
and tracking.
28

(2) Privacy of personal behaviour
This is the interest that individuals have in being free to conduct themselves
as they see fit, without unjustified surveillance. Particular concern arises in
relation to sensitive matters such as sexual preferences and habits, religious
practices, and political activities. Some privacy analyses, particularly in
Europe, extend this discussion to personal autonomy, liberty and the right to
self-determination.
Intrusions into this dimension of privacy have a chilling effect on social,
economic and political behaviour. The notion of private space is vital to all
aspects of behaviour and acts. It is relevant in private places such as the
home and toilet cubicles, and in public places, where casual observation by
the few people in the vicinity is very different from systematic observation
and recording. The recent transfer of many behaviours from physical to
electronic spaces has enabled marked increases in behavioural surveillance
and consequential threats to privacy, because:

27
Clarke, Privacy, Dataveillance, Organisational Strategy, above n 14; Clarke,
Introduction to Dataveillance and Information Privacy, and Definitions of Terms, above n
26.
28
R Clarke, Person-Location and Person-Tracking: Technologies, Risks and Policy
Implications (paper presented at 21st International Conference on Privacy and
Personal Data Protection, Hong Kong, September 1999). Revised version published
in (2001) 14(1) Information, Technology & People 206
<http://www.rogerclarke.com/DV/PLT.html>; K S Jones, Privacy: Whats
Different Now? (December 2003) 28(4) Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 287; d boyd,
Facebooks Privacy Trainwreck: Exposure, Invasion, and Social Convergence
(2009) 14(1) International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 13; R Clarke
and M R Wigan, You Are Where Youve Been: The Privacy Implications of
Location and Tracking Technologies (December 2011) 5(3-4) Journal of Location
Based Services 138 <http://www.rogerclarke.com/DV/YAWYB-CWP.html>; K
Michael and R Clarke, Location and Tracking of Mobile Devices: berveillance
Stalks the Streets (June 2013) 29(3) Computer Law & Security Review 216
<http://www.rogerclarke.com/DV/LTMD.html>.
Journal of Law, Information and Science Vol 23(1) 2014
EAP 8
previously localised human actions may now be observed by others
who are not in the vicinity, and whose ability to observe may not be
known to the actor(s);
previously ephemeral human actions have been subjected to sound,
image, video and electronic recording, and hence may be observed at
a later time;
previously ephemeral human actions may be re-discovered and re-
cycled, on multiple future occasions; and
social networks that were not previously detectable without intense
physical surveillance have become inferrable from electronic traffic.
(3) Privacy of personal communications
Individuals want, and need, the freedom to communicate among themselves,
using various media, without routine monitoring of their communications by
other persons or organisations. Issues include mail covers, use of directional
microphones and bugs with or without recording apparatus, and telephonic
interception. The recent transfer of many behaviours from physical to
electronic spaces has enabled marked increases in communications
surveillance and consequential threats to privacy. This is because:
previously ephemeral human communication acts have been
converted into machine-read form, and may be at least temporarily
stored, particularly in the case of email, chat and SMS, but also VOIP;
third parties have contrived to gain access to machine-read
communications in transit and in storage, in ways that were
previously precluded by longstanding laws protecting individuals
against undue intrusions by governments and corporations. This has
led to lively battles over data retention initiatives; and
what was once disparaged as conspiracy theory has now been widely
accepted as fact: national security agencies of the USA, and of other
hitherto relatively free nations, routinely access personal electronic
communications, without due cause, and in many cases with dubious
legality, without legal authority, or even in outright breach of the
law.
29


29
D Ellsberg, Edward Snowden: saving us from the United Stasi of America, The
Guardian (online), 10 June 2013
<http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/10/edward-snowden-
united-stasi-america>.
Privacy and Social Media: An Analytical Framework
EAP 9
(4) Privacy of personal data
This is referred to variously as data privacy and information privacy, and
regulatory measures are referred to as data protection. Individuals claim
that data about themselves should not be automatically available to other
individuals and organisations, and that, even where data is possessed by
another party, the individual must be able to exercise a substantial degree of
control over that data and its use. Many analyses focus on this dimension
almost to the exclusion of the others.
30

Recent developments have substantially altered longstanding balances, and
created new risks, in particular:
the capture of sensitive data that was never previously recorded. This
includes network location, micro-purchases, net-based purchases,
search-terms, visits to sites and accesses to content, plus geo-location,
and trails of locations enabling both retrospective and real-time
tracking;
the consolidation of many items of personal data, from many sources,
and its exploitation by governments and corporations through data
mining and big data techniques;
31

use, retention and disclosure of the aggregations of personal data,
because of the self-interest and overwhelming market power of the
small number of service-providers;
accessibility of the aggregations of sensitive personal data by
government agencies, in many cases without conventional constraints
such as judicial warrants, because of the failure of parliaments to
adapt longstanding protections to the digital age, and the granting of
large numbers of excessive powers to government agencies under the
pretext that the powers are necessary as counter-terrorism measures.
Underpinning the dramatic escalation of privacy threats since about 1995 has
been greatly intensified opposition by organisations to anonymity and even
pseudonymity, and greatly increased demands for all acts by all individuals
to be associated with the individuals real identity.
32
As a result of decreased

30
See, eg, D J Solove, A Taxonomy of Privacy (January 2006) 154(3) University of
Pennsylvania Law Review 477; D Solove, Understanding Privacy (Harvard University
Press, 2008).
31
M R Wigan and R Clarke, Big Datas Big Unintended Consequences (June 2013)
46(3) IEEE Computer <http://www.rogerclarke.com/DV/BigData-1303.html>.
32
A Krotoski, Online identity: is authenticity or anonymity more important?, The
Guardian (online), 19 April 2012
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/19/online-identity-
authenticity-anonymity/print>.
Journal of Law, Information and Science Vol 23(1) 2014
EAP 10
anonymity, content digitisation, cloud services, government intrusions and
copyright-protection powers, consideration now needs to be given to adding
one or more further dimensions.
33
The following is a likely candidate fifth
dimension:
(5) Privacy of personal experience
Individuals reasonably feel threatened by surveillance of their reading and
viewing, inter-personal communications and electronic social networks, and
of their physical meetings and electronic associations with other people. A
significant industry has developed that infers individuals interests and
attitudes from personal data mined from a wide array of sources.
The recording of previously private library-search transactions (through web
search-engine logs), book-purchases (through eCommerce logs) and reading
activities (through eBook logs and licensing databases) is striking far more
deeply inside the individuals psyche than ever before, enabling much more
reliable inferencing about the persons interests, formative influences and
attitudes. Concerns have been evident for many years, in the form of
arguments for a right to read anonymously,
34
and a broader right to
experience intellectual works in private free from surveillance.
35
The
diversity and intensity of threats arguably makes it now necessary to
recognise the cluster of issues as constituting a fifth dimension of privacy.
The increased concerns evident in the European Union in relation to US
corporate and government abuses of the personal data of Europeans
36
appears
to embody recognition of not only the privacy of personal communications,
data and behaviour, but to some extent also of the privacy of personal
experience.

33
R L Finn, D Wright and M Friedewald, Seven Types of Privacy in S Gutwirth, R
Leenes, P de Hert, and Y Poullet, European Data Protection: Coming of Age
(Springer Science+Business Media, 2013)
<http://works.bepress.com/michael_friedewald/60>.
34
J E Cohen, A Right to Read Anonymously: A Closer Look at Copyright
Management in Cyberspace (1996) 28 Connecticut Law Review 981
<http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=17990>.
35
G W Greenleaf, IP, Phone Home: Privacy as Part of Copyrights Digital Commons
in Hong Kong and Australian Law in L Lessig (ed), Hochelaga Lectures 2002: The
Innovation Commons (Sweet & Maxwell Asia, 2003)
<http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2356079>.
36
European Commission, Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the
Council on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and
on the free movement of such data (General Data Protection Regulation), 25 January 2012,
COM(2012) 11 final 2012/0011 (COD) <http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-
protection/document/review2012/com_2012_11_en.pdf>.
Privacy and Social Media: An Analytical Framework
EAP 11
1.2 Privacy applied to social media
At an early stage, commentators identified substantial privacy threats
inherent in Web 2.0, social networking services and social media generally.
37

Although privacy threats arise in relation to all categories of social media,
social networking services (SNS) are particularly rich both in inherent risks
and in aggressive behaviour by service-providers. This section accordingly
pays particular attention to SNS.
One of the earliest SNS, Plaxo, was subjected to criticism at the time of its
launch.
38
Google had two failures Orkut and Buzz before achieving
moderate market penetration with Google+. All three have been roundly
criticised for their serious hostility to the privacy not only of their users but
also of people exposed by their users.
39
Subsequently, Googles lawyers have
argued that users of Gmail, and by implication of all other Google services
have no legitimate expectation of privacy.
40

However, it is difficult not to focus on Facebook, not so much because it has
dominated many national markets for SNSs for several years, but rather
because it has done so much to test the boundaries of privacy abuse.
Summaries of its behaviour can be found in Bankston,
41
Opsahl,
42
The New

37
R Clarke, Very Black Little Black Books (February 2004) Xamax Consultancy
<http://www.rogerclarke.com/DV/ContactPITs.html>; W Harris, Why Web 2.0
will end your privacy (3 June 2006) bit-tech.net <http://www.bit-
tech.net/columns/2006/06/03/web_2_privacy/>; S B Barnes A privacy paradox:
Social networking in the United States (September 2006) 11(9) First Monday
<http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArt
icle/1394/1312%23>; Clarke, above n 3.
38
Clarke, Very Black Little Black Books, above n 37.
39
See, eg, boyd, above n 28; M Helft, Critics Say Google Invades Privacy With New
Service, The New York Times (online), 12 February 2010
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/technology/internet/13google.html?_r=
1>; R Waugh, Unfair and unwise: Google brings in new privacy policy for two
billion users - despite EU concerns it may be illegal, Daily Mail (online), 2 March
2012 <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2108564/Google-privacy-
policy-changes-Global-outcry-policy-ignored.html>; E Bell, The real threat to the
open web lies with the opaque elite who run it, The Guardian (online), 16 April
2012, <http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/16/threat-open-
web-opaque-elite>.
40
Google: Gmail users have no legitimate expectation of privacy (13 August 2013) rt.com
<http://rt.com/usa/google-gmail-motion-privacy-453/>.
41
K Bankston, Facebooks New Privacy Changes: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (9
December 2009) Electronic Frontier Foundation
<https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/facebooks-new-privacy-changes-good-
bad-and-ugly>.
42
K Opsahl, Facebooks Eroding Privacy Policy: A Timeline (28 April 2010) Electronic
Frontier Foundation <https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-

Journal of Law, Information and Science Vol 23(1) 2014
EAP 12
York Times,
43
McKeon,
44
boyd and Hargittai
45
and the British Broadcasting
Corporation (BBC).
46
Results of a survey are reported in Lankton and
McKnight.
47

After five years of bad behaviour by Facebook, Opsahl summarised the
situation as follows:
When [Facebook] started, it was a private space for
communication with a group of your choice. Soon, it transformed
into a platform where much of your information is public by
default. Today, it has become a platform where you have no
choice but to make certain information public, and this public
information may be shared by Facebook with its partner websites
and used to target ads.
48

The widespread publication of several epithets allegedly uttered by
Facebooks CEO Mark Zuckerberg, have reinforced the impression of
exploitation, particularly [w]e are building toward a web where the default is
social
49
and [t]hey trust me. Dumb f..ks.
50
These were exacerbated by the
hypocrisy of Zuckerbergs marketing executive and sister in relation to the re-
posting of a photograph of her on Twitter, documented in Adams.
51
Some of
the most memorable quotations in relation to privacy and social media have

timeline/>.
43
G Gates, Facebook Privacy: A Bewildering Tangle of Options, The New York Times
(online), 12 May 2010
<http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/05/12/business/facebook-
privacy.html
44
M McKeon, The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook (May 2010) mattmckeon.com
<http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/>.
45
d boyd and E Hargittai, Facebook privacy settings: Who cares? (July 2010) 15(8)
First Monday
<http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/30
86/2589>.
46
BBC, Facebook U-turns on phone and address data sharing, BBC News (online),
18 January 2011 <http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-12214628>.
47
N Lankton and D H McKnight, What Does it Mean to Trust Facebook? Examining
Technology and Interpersonal Trust Beliefs (2012) 42(2) Data Base for Advances in
Information Systems 32.
48
Opsahl, above n 42.
49
M Shiels, Facebooks bid to rule the web as it goes social, BBC News (online), 22
April 2010 <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8590306.stm>.
50
N Carlson, Well, These New Zuckerberg IMs Wont Help Facebooks Privacy Problems
(13 May 2010) Business Insider <http://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-
new-zuckerberg-ims-wont-help-facebooks-privacy-problems-2010-5>.
51
Adams, above n 7.
Privacy and Social Media: An Analytical Framework
EAP 13
been self-serving statements by executives in the business, such as Scott
McNealys [y]ou have zero privacy anyway. Get over it
52
and Eric Schmidts
[i]f you have something that you dont want [Google and its customers] to
know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place.
53

The conclusion reached in 2012 by a proponent of social media was damning:
[The social networking services] makes profit primarily by using
heretofore private information it has collected about you to target
advertising. And Zuckerberg has repeatedly made sudden,
sometimes ill conceived and often poorly communicated policy
changes that resulted in once-private personal information
becoming instantly and publicly accessible. As a result, once-
latent concerns over privacy, power and profit have bubbled up
and led both domestic and international regulatory agencies to
scrutinize the company more closely ... The high-handed manner
in which members personal information has been treated, the
lack of consultation or even communication with them
beforehand, Facebooks growing domination of the entire social
networking sphere, Zuckerbergs constant and very public
declarations of the death of privacy and his seeming imposition
of new social norms all feed growing fears that he and Facebook
itself simply can not be trusted.
54

Social media features can be divided into three broad categories. In the case of
human interaction tools, users generally assume that conversations are
private, and in some cases are subject to various forms of non-disclosure
conventions. However, social media service-providers sit between the
conversation-partners and in almost all cases store the conversation
thereby converting ephemeral communications into archived statements
and give themselves the right to exploit the contents. Moreover, service-
providers strive to keep the messaging flows internal, and hence exploitable
by, and only by, that company, rather than enabling their users to take
advantage of external and standards-based messaging services such as email.
The second category of social media features, content broadcast, by its nature
involves publication. Privacy concerns still arise, however, in several ways.
SNS providers, in seeking to capture wall-postings, encourage, and in some
cases even enforce, self-exposure of profile data. A further issue is that
service-providers may intrude into users personal space by monitoring

52
P Sprenger, Sun on privacy: Get over it Wired (online), 26 Jan 1999
<http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/1999/01/17538>.
53
R Esguerra, Google CEO Eric Schmidt Dismisses the Importance of Privacy (10
December 2009) Electronic Frontiers Foundation,
<https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-schmidt-dismisses-
privacy>.
54
OConnor, above n 12.
Journal of Law, Information and Science Vol 23(1) 2014
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content with a view to punishing or discriminating against individuals who
receive particular broadcasts, eg because the content is in breach of criminal
or civil law, is against the interests of the service-provider, or is deemed by
the service-provider to be in breach of good taste. The primary concern,
however, is that the individual who initiates the broadcast may not be able to
protect their identity. This is important where the views may be unpopular
with some organisations or individuals, particularly where those
organisations or individuals may represent a threat to the persons safety. It is
vital to society that whistleblowing be possible. There are contrary public
interests, in particular that individuals who commit serious breaches such as
unjustified disclosure of sensitive information, intentionally harmful
misrepresentation, and incitement to violence, be able to be held accountable
for their actions. That justifies the establishment of carefully constructed
forms of strong pseudonymity; but it does not justify an infrastructure that
imposes on all users the requirement to disclose, and perhaps openly publish,
their real identity.
The third category of social media features, content collaboration, overlaps
with broadcasting, but is oriented towards shared or multi-sourced content
rather than sole-sourced content. SNS providers exploit the efforts of content
communities an approach usefully referred to as effort syndication.
55
This
gives rise to a range of privacy issues. Even the least content-rich form,
indicator-sharing, may generate privacy risk for individuals, such as the
casting of a vote in a particular direction on some topic that attracts
opprobrium (eg paedophilia, racism or the holocaust, but also criticisms of a
repressive regime).
The current, somewhat chaotic state of social media services involves
significant harm to individuals privacy, which is likely to progressively
undermine suppliers business models. Constructive approaches are needed
to address the problems.
2 An Analytical Framework
This section proposes a basis for a sufficiently deep understanding of the
privacy aspects of social media, structured in a way that guides design
decisions. It first reviews the notion of trust. In both the academic and
business literatures, the focus has been almost entirely on the positive notion
of trust, frequently to the complete exclusion of the negative notion of distrust.
It is argued here that both concepts need to be understood and addressed. A
framework and definitions are proposed that enable the varying impacts of
trust-relevant factors to be recognised and evaluated.

55
Clarke, above n 3.
Privacy and Social Media: An Analytical Framework
EAP 15
2.1 Concepts
Trust originates in family and social settings, and is associated with cultural
affinities and inter-dependencies. This paper is concerned with factors that
relate to the trustworthiness or otherwise of other parties to a social or
economic transaction. Trust in another party is associated with a state of
willingness to expose oneself to risks.
56
Rather than treating trust as
expectation of the persistence and fulfilment of the natural and the moral
orders,
57
Yamagishi distinguishes trust as expectations of competence and
trust as expectations of intention.
58
The following is proposed as an
operational definition relevant to the contexts addressed in this paper:
59

Trust is confident reliance by one party on the behaviour of one
or more other parties.
The importance of trust varies a great deal, depending on the context. Key
factors include the extent of the risk exposure, the elapsed time during which
the exposure exists, and whether insurance is available, affordable and
effective. Trust is most critical where a party has little knowledge of the other
party, or far less power than the other party.
The trust concept has been applied outside its original social setting. Of
relevance to the present paper, it is much-used in economic contexts: From a
rational perspective, trust is a calculation of the likelihood of future
cooperation.
60
This paper is concerned with the trustworthiness or otherwise
of a party to a transaction, rather than, for example, of the quality of a
tradeable item, of its fit to the consumers need, of the delivery process, or of
the infrastructure and institutions on which the conduct of the transaction
depends. The determinants of trust have attracted considerable attention
during the two decades after 1994, as providers of web-commerce services
endeavoured to overcome impediments to the adoption of electronic
transactions between businesses and consumers, popularly referred to as B2C

56
B Schneier, Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive (Wiley,
2012) particularly ch 4.
57
B Barber, The Logic and Limit of Trust (Rutgers University Press, 1983).
58
T Yamagishi, Trust: The Evolutionary Game of Mind and Society (Springer, 2011) 28.
59
Clarke, Trust in the Context of e-Business above n 9; R Clarke, e-Consent: A
Critical Element of Trust in e-Business' (Proceedings of the 15th Bled Electronic
Commerce Conference, Bled, Slovenia, 17-19 June, 2002)
<http://www.rogerclarke.com/EC/eConsent.html>.
60
R M Kramer and T R Tyler (eds), Trust in Organizations: Frontiers of Theory and
Research (Sage Research, 1996) 4, citing O Williamson, Calculativeness, trust, and
economic organization (1993) 36 Journal of Law and Economics 453.
Journal of Law, Information and Science Vol 23(1) 2014
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eCommerce. The B2C eCommerce literature contains a great many papers
that refer to trust, and that investigate very specific aspects of it.
61

It is feasible for cultural affinities to be achieved in some B2C contexts. For
example, consumers dealings with cooperatives, such as credit unions, may
achieve this, because they are us. On the other hand, it is infeasible for for-
profit corporations to achieve anything more than an ersatz form of trust with
their customers, because corporations law demands that priority be given to
the interests of the corporation above all other interests.
I have previously analysed the bases on which a proxy for positive trust can
be established in B2C eCommerce were analysed in Clarke.
62
Trust may arise
from a direct relationship between the parties (such as a contract, or prior
transactions); or from experience (such as a prior transaction, a trial
transaction, or vicarious experience). When such relatively strong sources of
trust are not available, it may be necessary to rely on referred trust, such as
delegated contractual arrangements, word-of-mouth, or indicators of
reputation. Ignoring the question of preparedness to transact, empirical
evidence from studies of eBay transactions suggests that the quality of a
sellers reputation has a consistent, statistically significant, and positive
impact on the price of the good.
63
The fact that reputations impact on price
tends to be small
64
is consistent with the suggestion that reputation derived
from reports by persons unknown is of modest rather than major importance.
Mere brand names are a synthetic and ineffective basis for trust. The weakest
of all forms is meta-brands, such as seals of approval signifying some form
of accreditation by organisations that are no better-known than the company
that they purport to be attesting to.
65
The organisations that operate meta-
brands generally protect their own interests with considerably more vigour
than they do the interests of consumers.
Where the market power of the parties to a transaction is reasonably balanced,
the interests of both parties may be reflected in the terms of the contracts that
they enter into. This is seldom the case with B2C commerce generally,
however, nor with B2C eCommerce in particular. It is theoretically feasible for
consumers to achieve sufficient market power to ensure balanced contract
terms, in particular through amalgamation of their individual buying-power,

61
For example, M K O Lee and E Turban, A Trust Model for Consumer Internet
Shopping (Fall 2001) 6(1) International Journal of Electronic Commerce 75.
62
Clarke, Trust in the Context of e-Business above n 9.
63
M I Melnik and J Alm, Does a Sellers eCommerce Reputation Matter? Evidence
from eBay Auctions (September 2002) 50(3) Journal of Industrial Economics 337, 337
<http://www.gsu.edu/~wwwsps/publications/2002/ebay.pdf>.
64
Ibid 349.
65
R Clarke, Meta-Brands (May 2001) 7(11) Privacy Law & Policy Reporter
<http://www.rogerclarke.com/DV/MetaBrands.html>.
Privacy and Social Media: An Analytical Framework
EAP 17
or through consumer rights legislation. In practice, however, an effective
balance of power seldom arises.
Many recent treatments of trust in B2C eCommerce adopt the postulates of
Mayer, Davis and Schoorman,
66
to the effect that the main attributes
underlying a partys trustworthiness are ability, integrity and benevolence
to which website quality has subsequently been added. See for example Lee
and Turban
67
and Salo and Karjaluoto.
68
However, it appears unlikely that a
body of theory based on the assumption of altruistic behaviour by for-profit
organisations is capable of delivering much of value. In practice, consumer
marketing corporations seek to achieve trust by contriving the appearance of
cultural affinities. One such means is the offering of economic benefits to
frequent buyers, but projecting the benefits using not an economic term but
rather one that invokes social factors: loyalty programs. Another approach is
to use advertising, advertorials and promotional activities to project socially
positive imagery onto a brand name and logo. To be relevant to the practice of
social media, research needs to be based on models that reflect realities, rather
than embody imaginary constructs such as corporate benevolence.
During the twentieth centurys mass marketing and direct marketing eras,
consumer marketing corporations were well-served by the conceptualisation
of consumer as prey. That stance continued to be applied when B2C
eCommerce emerged during the second half of the 1990s. That the old
attitude fitted poorly to the new context was evidenced by the succession of
failed initiatives documented by Clarke.
69
These included billboards on the
information superhighway (1994-95), closed electronic communities (1995-97),
push technologies (1996-98), spam (1996-), infomediaries (1996-99), portals
(1998-2000) and surreptitious data capture (1999-). Habits die hard, however,
and to a considerable extent consumers are still being treated as quarry by
consumer marketers. It is therefore necessary to have terms that refer to the
opposite of trust.
The convention has been to assume that trust is either present, or it is not, and
hence:
Lack of Trust is the absence, or inadequacy, of confidence by one
party in the reliability of the behaviour of one or more other
parties.

66
R C Mayer, J H Davis and F D Schoorman, An Integrative Model of
Organizational Trust (1995) 20(3) Academy of Management Review 709.
67
Lee and Turban, above n 61.
68
J Salo and H Karjaluoto, A conceptual model of trust in the online environment
(September 2007) 31(5) Online Information Review 604.
69
R Clarke, The Willingness of Net-Consumers to Pay: A Lack-of-Progress Report
(Proceedings of the 12th International Bled Electronic Commerce Conference, Bled,
Slovenia, 7-9 June, 1999) <http://www.rogerclarke.com/EC/WillPay.html>.
Journal of Law, Information and Science Vol 23(1) 2014
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This notion alone is not sufficient, however, because it fails to account for
circumstances in which, rather than there being either a positive feeling or an
absence of it, there is instead a negative element present, which represents a
positive impediment rather than merely the lack of a positive motivator to
transact. The concept of negative ratings
70
falls short of that need. This
author accordingly proposes the following additional term and definition:
Distrust is the active belief by one party that the behaviour of one
or more other parties is not reliable.
There are few treatments of distrust in the B2C eCommerce literature, but see
McKnight and Chervany,
71
and the notion of trustbuster in Riegelsberger
and Sasse.
72

One further concept is needed, in order to account for the exercise of market
power in B2C eCommerce. Most such business is subject to Terms of Service
imposed by merchants. These embody considerable advantages to the
companies and few for consumers. The terms imposed by social media
companies are among the most extreme seen in B2C eCommerce.
73
In such
circumstances, there is no trust grounded in cultural affinity. The consumer
may have a choice of merchants, but the terms that the merchants impose are
uniformly consumer-hostile. Hence, a separate term is proposed, to refer to a
degraded form of trust:
Forced Trust is hope held by one party that the behaviour of one
or more other parties will be reliable, despite the absence of
important trust factors.

70
S Ba and P Pavlou, Evidence of the effect of trust building technology in electronic
markets: Price premiums and buyer behavior (September 2002) 26(3) MIS
Quarterly 243 <http://oz.stern.nyu.edu/rr2001/emkts/ba.pdf>.
71
D H McKnight and N L Chervany, While trust is cool and collected, distrust is
fiery and frenzied: A model of distrust concepts (Proceedings of the 7th Americas
Conference on Information Systems, Boston, 3-5 August, 2001) 883; D H McKnight
and N L Chervany, Trust and Distrust Definitions: One Bite at a Time in R
Falcone, M Singh and Y-H Tan (eds): Trust in Cyber-societies, LNAI 2246, (Springer-
Verlag, 2001) 27; D H McKnight and N L Chervany Distrust and Trust in B2C E-
Commerce: Do They Differ? (Proceedings of ICEC06, Fredericton, Canada 1416
August, 2006).
72
J Riegelsberger and M A Sasse, Trustbuilders and Trustbusters: The Role of Trust Cues
in Interfaces to e-Commerce Applications (Presented at the 1st IFIP Conference on e-
commerce, e-business, e-government (i3e) Zurich, 3-5 October 2001) 17-30,
<http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.17.8688&rep=rep1&t
ype=pdf>.
73
Clarke, B2C Distrust Factors in the Prosumer Era, above n 9; R Clarke, The
Cloudy Future of Consumer Computing (Proceedings of the 24th Bled
eConference, June 2011) <http://www.rogerclarke.com/EC/CCC.html>.
Privacy and Social Media: An Analytical Framework
EAP 19
2.2 Categories of trust factor
The concepts presented in the previous sub-section provide a basis for
developing insights into privacy problems and their solutions. In order to
operationalise the concepts, however, it is necessary to distinguish several
different categories of trust factor.
A Driver is a factor that, alone, is sufficient to determine an adoption/non-
adoption decision. This is distinct from the straw that broke the camels back
phenomenon. In that case, the most recent Influencer causes a threshold to be
reached, but only by adding its weight to other, pre-existing Influencers.
The definitions in Figure 1 use the generic terms party and conduct of a
transaction, in order to provide broad scope. They encompass both social and
economic transactions, and both natural persons as parties variously in
social roles, as consumers, as prosumers, and as producers and legal
persons, including social not-for-profit associations, economic not-for-profits
such as charities, for-profit corporations, and government agencies.
A Trust Influencer is a factor that has a positive influence on the
likelihood of a party conducting a transaction
A Distrust Influencer is a factor that has a negative influence on
the likelihood of a party conducting a transaction
A Trust Driver is a factor that has such a strong positive influence
on the likelihood of a party conducting a transaction that it
determines the outcome
A Distrust Driver is a factor that has such a strong negative
influence on the likelihood of a party conducting a transaction
that it determines the outcome
Figure 1: The Four Categories of Trust Factor
In Figure 2, the relationships among the concepts are depicted in the
mnemonic form of a see-saw, and are supplemented by commonly used terms
associated with each category.
Journal of Law, Information and Science Vol 23(1) 2014
EAP 20

Figure 2: A Depiction of the Categories of Trust Factor
Some trust factors are applicable to consumers generally, and hence the
distinctions can be applied to an aggregate analysis of the market for a
particular tradeable item or class of items. Attitudes to many factors vary
among consumers, however; and hence the framework can be usefully
applied at the most granular level, that is, to individual decisions by
individual consumers. For many purposes, an effective compromise is likely
to be achieved by identifying consumer segments, and conducting analyses
from the perspective of each segment. Hence, a driver is likely to be described
in conditional terms, such as for consumers who are risk-averse..., for
consumers who live outside major population centres..., and for consumers
who are seeking a long-term service....
The commercial aspects of the relationship between merchant and consumer
offer many examples of each category of trust factor. Distrust Drivers include
proven incapacity of the merchant to deliver, such as insolvency. On the other
hand, low cost combined with functional superiority represents a Trust
Driver. Non-return policies are usually a Distrust Influencer rather than a
Distrust Driver, whereas return within 7 days for a full refund is likely to be
a Trust Influencer. Merchants naturally play on human frailties in an
endeavour to convert Influencers into Drivers, through such devices as 50%
discount, for today only.
Beyond commercial aspects, other clusters of trust factors include the quality,
reliability and safety of the tradeable item, its fit to the consumers
circumstances and needs, and privacy. This paper is concerned with the last
of these.
Privacy and Social Media: An Analytical Framework
EAP 21
3 Implications
The analytical framework introduced in the previous section provides a basis
for improving the design of social media services in order to address the
privacy concerns of consumers and the consequential privacy risks of service-
providers.
3.1 The design of social media services
The categorisation of trust factors provides designers with a means of
focussing on the aspects that matter most. Hedonism and fashion represent
drivers for the adoption and use of services. The first priority therefore is to
identify and address the Distrust Drivers that undermine adoption of the
providers services.
Some privacy factors will have a significant negative impact on all or most
users. Many, however, will be relevant only to particular customer-segments,
or will only be relevant to particular users in particular circumstances or for a
particular period of time. An important example of a special segment is
people whose safety is likely to be threatened by exposure, perhaps of their
identity, their location, or sensitive information about them.
74
Another
important segment is people who place very high value on their privacy,
preferring (for any of a variety of reasons) to stay well out of the public eye.
A detailed analysis of specific privacy features is in a companion paper.
75
A
couple of key examples of features that may be Distrust Drivers are reliance
on what was referred to in the above framework as forced trust,
requirements that the user declare their commonly-used identity or so-called
'real name', and default disclosure of the users geo-location to the service-
provider.
The distrust analysis needs to extend to factors that are influencers rather
than drivers, because moderate numbers of negative factors, particularly if
they frequently rise into a users consciousness, are likely to morph into an
aura of untrustworthiness, and thereby cause the relationship with the user to
be fragile rather than loyal.
Examples of active measures that can be used to negate distrust include
transparency in relation to Terms of Service,
76
the conduct of a privacy impact
assessment, including focus groups and consultations with advocacy

74
For a comprehensive analysis of the categories of persons at risk, see GFW, Who is
harmed by a Real Names policy? (2011) Geek Feminism Wiki
<http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Real_Names%
22_policy%3F>.
75
Clarke, above n 10.
76
R Clarke, Privacy Statement Template (2005) Xamax Consultancy
<http://www.rogerclarke.com/DV/PST.html>.
Journal of Law, Information and Science Vol 23(1) 2014
EAP 22
organisations,
77
mitigation measures where privacy risks arise, prepared
countermeasures where actual privacy harm arises and prepared responses to
enquiries and accusations about privacy harm.
Although overcoming distrust offers the greater payback to service-providers,
they may benefit from attention to Trust Drivers and Trust Influencers as well.
This will also be in many cases to the benefit of users. Factors of relevance
include: privacy-settings that are comprehensive, clear and stable;
conservative defaults; means for users to manage their profile-data; consent-
based rather than unilateral changes to Terms of Service; express support for
pseudonymity and multiple identifiers; and inbuilt support and guidance in
relation to proxy-servers and other forms of obfuscation. Some users will be
attracted by the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture with dispersed storage
and transmission paths rather than the centralisation of power that is inherent
in client-server architecture.
3.2 Research opportunities
The copious media coverage of privacy issues in the social media services
marketplace provides considerable raw material for research.
78
A formal
research literature is only now emergent, and opportunities exist for
significant contributions to be made.
The analysis conducted in this paper readily gives rise to a number of
research questions. For example:
which factors are drivers and which are merely influencers?
does their role depend on contextual factors, and if so what are they?
what are the trade-offs among influencers?
how much do people sell privacy for?
how much do people pay to buy privacy?
to what extent do personal and contextual factors determine drivers?
to what extent do personal and contextual factors affect trade-offs?
An example of the kinds of trade-off research that would pay dividends is
provided by Kaplan and Haenlein:
In December 2008, the fast food giant [Burger King] developed a
Facebook application which gave users a free Whopper sandwich
for every 10 friends they deleted from their Facebook network.

77
D Wright and P de Hert (eds), Privacy Impact Assessment (Springer, 2012).
78
Clarke, above n 10.
Privacy and Social Media: An Analytical Framework
EAP 23
The campaign was adopted by over 20,000 users, resulting in the
sacrificing of 233,906 friends in exchange for free burgers. Only
one month later, in January 2009, Facebook shut down Whopper
Sacrifice, citing privacy concerns. Who would have thought that
the price of a friendship is less than $2 a dozen?
79

The vignette suggests that the presumption that people sell their privacy very
cheaply may have a corollary that peoples privacy can be bought very
cheaply as well.
A wide range of research techniques can be applied to such studies.
80
Surveys
deliver convenience data of limited relevance, testing what people say they
do, or would do and all too often merely what they say they think. Other
techniques hold much more promise as a means of addressing the research
questions identified above, in particular field studies of actual human
behaviour, laboratory experiments involving actual human behaviour in
controlled environments, demonstrators, and open-source code to implement
services or features.
4 Conclusions
Privacy concerns about social media services vary among user segments, and
over time. Some categories of people, some of the time, are subject to serious
safety risks as a result of self-exposure and exposure by others; many people,
a great deal of the time, are subject to privacy harm; and some people simply
dislike being forced to be open and exposed, and much prefer to lead a closed
life. From time to time, negative public reactions and media coverage have
affected many social media providers, including Facebook, Google and
Instagram. There are signs that the occurrences are becoming more frequent
and more intensive.
The analytical framework presented in this paper offers a means whereby
designers can identify aspects of their services that need attention, either to
prevent serious harm to their business or to increase the attractiveness of their
services to their target markets. Researchers can also apply the framework in
order to gain insights into the significance of the various forms of privacy
concern.

79
Kaplan and Haenlein, above n 4, 67.
80
R D Galliers, Choosing Information Systems Research Approaches in R D Galliers
(ed), Information Systems Research: Issues, Methods and Practical Guidelines (Blackwell,
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