How does online social networking redefine the concept of privacy?
I’m not convinced by arguments that social networking redefines the notion of privacy. I haven’t seen any strong evidence that users view privacy differently on these sites versus in the offline world. My opinion is supported by the fact that many of the patterns of human interaction in the offline world have been shown to also be true on sites like Facebook. For example, people may have thousands of “friends” on Facebook, but researchers have observed that people interact only with a small number of them. Similarly, we’ve observed that people form tight-knit groups in online social networks, much in the same way that sociologists have observed offline. Thus, I have yet to see compelling evidence that peoples’ interaction patterns, or views on privacy, have shifted. Your research relies on gathering data from social networks. Will the emergence of user-controlled privacy settings negatively impact your research? Yes and no. If users begin to use their privacy settings to restrict who c
