Determining the Role of Social Identity Attributes to the Protection of Users’ Privacy in Social Media

Katerina Vgena, Angeliki Kitsiou, Christos Kalloniatis () and Stefanos Gritzalis
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Katerina Vgena: Privacy Engineering and Social Informatics Laboratory, Department of Cultural Technology and Communication, University of the Aegean, GR 81100 Lesvos, Greece
Angeliki Kitsiou: Privacy Engineering and Social Informatics Laboratory, Department of Cultural Technology and Communication, University of the Aegean, GR 81100 Lesvos, Greece
Christos Kalloniatis: Privacy Engineering and Social Informatics Laboratory, Department of Cultural Technology and Communication, University of the Aegean, GR 81100 Lesvos, Greece
Stefanos Gritzalis: Department of Digital Systems, University of Piraeus, GR 18534 Piraeus, Greece

Future Internet, 2022, vol. 14, issue 9, 1-18

Abstract: Drawing on digital identity theories, social software engineering theory (SSE), and the Privacy Safeguard (PriS) methodology, we examined the way that personal information uploaded on social media (SM) imposes privacy issues. Throughout a review on users’ self-representation on SM, we examined the impact of self-determination and self-disclosure on users’ privacy, and we identified the social attributes (SA) that cause privacy implications. This paper specifies 18 SA that users employ to achieve their optimal level of representation while summarizing possible ways that these attributes provoke users’ identification. In particular, our research has shown that SM users represent their personas by unveiling SA to construct popular, representative, and conversational profiles. As disclosing SA increases privacy implications, we intend to help users build profiles that respect their privacy. Examining users’ SA deepens our understanding of disclosing personal information on SM while leading to a better quantification of identity attributes; furthermore, users’ top five most revealing attributes were summarized. Considering that SSE addresses users’ privacy implications from an early stage of systems designing, our research, identifying the SA, will be helpful in addressing privacy from a socio-technical aspect, aiming at bridging the socio-technical gap by drawing designers’ attention to users’ social aspects.

Keywords: social media; socio-technical theory; identity; privacy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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