Manifestations of users’ privacy concerns in a formative usability test of social networking site

Abstract

Social media and social network sites (SNS) need to preserve users’ privacy, in order to achieve full acceptance and to succeed in the application markets. Thus, SNS developers need to understand and take into account users’ privacy concerns as early as possible in the development. It is difficult, however, to foresee how the system fulfills users’ privacy expectations until the system is in actual use. Different user-centered techniques applied during the development can offer insights for developers into users’ privacy expectations and concerns. In this paper, we empirically show what kinds of privacy concerns users spontaneously brought forth in a formative usability test of a social networking site and how these were attributable to different features of the application and related coping mechanisms. The identified manifestations of privacy concerns help SNS designers and evaluators to pay attention early to privacy issues as a natural part of user centered development.