SEKE 2012 Proceedings - Knowledge Systems Institute

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Figure 2. Permission dialogue, accessed data
Except Twitter, the dialogues of all OSNs provide
sketchy details. 6 Facebook and Google+ provide coarse
summaries; Google+ users can retrieve details, but only after
clicking on the summary. Most users will either not know
or care to take this extra step without explicit instruction.
LinkedIn and Orkut ambiguously caution users that their information
will be shared with third parties and seek assent to
terms of service linked from the dialogue. Finally, YouTube
dialogues provide no details about the data that third parties
can retrieve once users provide their consent.
4 Conclusions and Future Work
This paper reveals that OSN APIs expose signif cant user
data, and substantially enable third parties to act on behalf
of their users. Their privacy options are not comprehensive
and can be exercised only with limited scopes. Permissions
are often confusing and inconsistent, and their ambiguous
presentation may mislead users into revealing excessive information.
OSNs thus tip the scale towards information exposure
versus privacy protection, lending ample support to
critics’ skepticism regarding user privacy.
Our future work seeks to quantify the privacy content
in the information posted by different demographic groups.
We also propose to develop tools and educational materials
to raise public awareness about how third parties can exploit
APIs to collect user data and how users can protect themselves
by adopting proper measures.
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6 Images of these dialogues are available at:
http://cse.uconn.edu/∼ded02007/osnapi
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