"My life doesn't have to be an open book": A model to help designers to enhance privacy controls on social network sites

Abstract

Social network sites (SNS) are powerful technologies to bring people together and share information, changing the way society interacts in contemporary days. SNS such as Facebook have grown in popularity in recent years, reaching 1,3 billion monthly active users. However, as this network helps to make the world more open and connected, participants inevitably end up losing control over the extent that their personal information may reach among people that belong to their social circle or not. In this context we present +PrivacyCTRL, a model to enhance privacy controls on SNS, which supports the design of privacy settings in order to give users more autonomy over what they publish in these networks. +PrivacyCTRL was applied - via paper prototype technique - to three well-known SNS and showed promise in clarifying the privacy settings and improving the user's choice about what to reveal and to whom. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.