Evaluating social media privacy settings for personal and advertising purposes

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to define two types of privacy, which are distinct but often reduced to each other. It also investigates which form of privacy is most prominent in privacy settings of online social networks (OSN). Privacy between users is different from privacy between a user and a third party. OSN, and to a lesser extent researchers, often reduce the former to the latter, which results in misleading users and public debate about privacy. Design/methodology/approach – The authors define two types of privacy that account for the difference between interpersonal and third-party disclosure. The first definition draws on symbolic interactionist accounts of privacy, wherein users are performing dramaturgically for an intended audience. Third-party privacy is based on the data that represent the user in data mining and knowledge discovery processes, which ultimately manipulate users into audience commodities. This typology was applied to the privacy settings of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twit...