Nudging Pakistani users towards privacy on social networks

Social Networking Sites (SNS) have been studied extensively over the last 10 years. The area of privacy and security has always been the prominent area of research. With the exponential increase of social networking users the numbers of threats have increased alarmingly; stealing personal information has been the most common threat as the information is later used to carry out subsequent malicious activities. The vulnerabilities are exploited because majority of SNS users are usually unaware of consequences of disclosing personal information over the public forums without proper privacy measures. Unaware users usually choose weak settings and are not mindful regarding posting their personal information online. The users trust their SNS providers for providing necessary security and privacy to their data, this excessive trust and ignorance results in different degrees of privacy violations. Considering the fact that the privacy preferences of users are strongly influenced by cultural and ethnical differences, the following research was conducted to study the privacy concerns of Pakistani users and the privacy problems associated with posting on SNS. It was found that the users are keenly concerned about their privacy however, they are unable to achieve the desired privacy on SNS as a result of the lack of awareness of privacy options, inappropriate settings and the excessive time associated with configuring those settings. Based on the above observations the idea of nudging the user from behavioral science has been proposed to help people make better privacy choices and decisions on online social networks. The proposed model will nudge users while posting by calculating Privacy Score and Accessing Last Modified Privacy Settings for users which will alert users to adjust their privacy settings. The idea of Privacy Nudges will help HCI researchers to build more sophisticated and user friendly Privacy features without getting into lengthy and time consuming details of adjusting privacy settings.