Searching on Facebook Through the Lens of the Concept of Privacy

Abstract

This chapter points out that judges and legislators didn't consider privacy risks on social networking sites and user's thinking mode in this legal privacy protection mechanism. Social networking sites have considerable privacy risks: improper personal information flow, such as information to be leaked to the third-party software, to be tagged unwillingly on photos, or involuntarily to be shared one's own living news, even self-monitoring by individual recognizes while using social networking sites, or social control. And a user is accustomed to assess privacy risks and set privacy preferences based on his/her experiences and social relationships in the real world. This thinking mode is different form the legal privacy protection mode (on/off), and could not be sufficiently protected by the current regulations. This chapter thought that Helen Nissenbaum's ``privacy in context{''} theory may be the solution. This theory not only considered the approach that users assess privacy risks, but also provided ``appropriateness{''} and ``transmission{''} principles to solve the current issues. In fact, privacy as context theory did not create a totally new theory deviating from the reasonable expectation of privacy. It is better to say that this theory, as the supplementary, gave a new approach to explain the reasonableness standard, and a new normative sense of the past legal concept. It might find a more reasonable boundary to protect the gradually eroded privacy on social networking sites.