TY - GEN
T1 - A democracy called facebook? Participation as a privacy strategy on social media
AU - Engelmann, Severin
AU - Grossklags, Jens
AU - Papakyriakopoulos, Orestis
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018.
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - Despite its known inadequacies, notice and consent is still the most common privacy practice on social media platforms. Indeed, conceptualizing alternative privacy strategies for the social media context has proven to be difficult. In 2009, Facebook implemented a participatory governance system that enabled users to vote on its privacy policy. However, three years later, Facebook held a final vote that led to the termination of its participatory governance system. Here, we empirically assess this participatory privacy strategy designed to democratize social media policy-making. We describe the different components of Facebook’s participatory governance system, show how users could influence privacy policy decision-making, and report the privacy policies users accepted and rejected by vote. Furthermore, we identify the common themes users discussed during the final electoral period by applying an unsupervised machine learning topic modeling algorithm to thousands of Facebook user comments. Our results demonstrate that users voiced concerns about being insufficiently informed about participation commitments and possibilities, attempted to orchestrate a transfer of the vote to a third-party platform, and engaged in spreading misconstrued data ownership claims. Based on our results, we analyze the key reasons behind Facebook’s failure to implement a successful participation process. Finally, we highlight the significance of framing diversity for privacy decision-making in the context of a participatory privacy strategy on social media.
AB - Despite its known inadequacies, notice and consent is still the most common privacy practice on social media platforms. Indeed, conceptualizing alternative privacy strategies for the social media context has proven to be difficult. In 2009, Facebook implemented a participatory governance system that enabled users to vote on its privacy policy. However, three years later, Facebook held a final vote that led to the termination of its participatory governance system. Here, we empirically assess this participatory privacy strategy designed to democratize social media policy-making. We describe the different components of Facebook’s participatory governance system, show how users could influence privacy policy decision-making, and report the privacy policies users accepted and rejected by vote. Furthermore, we identify the common themes users discussed during the final electoral period by applying an unsupervised machine learning topic modeling algorithm to thousands of Facebook user comments. Our results demonstrate that users voiced concerns about being insufficiently informed about participation commitments and possibilities, attempted to orchestrate a transfer of the vote to a third-party platform, and engaged in spreading misconstrued data ownership claims. Based on our results, we analyze the key reasons behind Facebook’s failure to implement a successful participation process. Finally, we highlight the significance of framing diversity for privacy decision-making in the context of a participatory privacy strategy on social media.
KW - Online participation
KW - Privacy
KW - Social media democracy
KW - Social media governance
KW - Topic modeling
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85059692658&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-030-02547-2_6
DO - 10.1007/978-3-030-02547-2_6
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85059692658
SN - 9783030025465
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 91
EP - 108
BT - Privacy Technologies and Policy - 6th Annual Privacy Forum, APF 2018, Revised Selected Papers
A2 - Medina, Manel
A2 - Rannenberg, Kai
A2 - Schweighofer, Erich
A2 - Mitrakas, Andreas
A2 - Tsouroulas, Nikolaos
PB - Springer Verlag
T2 - 6th Annual Privacy Forum, APF 2018
Y2 - 13 June 2018 through 14 June 2018
ER -