How Do Default Privacy Settings on Social Media Apps Match People’s Actual Preferences?

Abstract

Many social media apps provide privacy settings that allow users to control how their data should be processed and shared. Also, every account in these apps comes with default privacy settings that are often difficult to grasp and find, even for experts. Therefore, many users’ data may be utilized outside of their actual preferences. In this paper, we aim to explore how default privacy settings match people’s real preferences. To this end, we performed a UK-based online survey where we asked respondents about their preferences for some privacy settings of popular social media apps like Facebook and LinkedIn. The results show that the default privacy settings of many social media apps other than Google and Twitter do not reflect the true preferences of the majority of people. Even Google and Twitter were able to meet the preferences of only 61% and 54% of the respondents, respectively, which is far from a mere majority. Moreover, most of the respondents disapproved of data sharing with partners and personalized ads, which are common privacy settings in different apps and mostly enabled by default.