Designing privacy-aware online social networks - A reflective socio-technical approach

Current empirical studies of online social networks comprehensively describe users’ experiences with interactional privacy management but provide only little concrete software design assistance to address identified privacy issues. We argue that the scarceness of practical guidelines to tackle privacy issues through software design might be due to the research approach. We suggest focusing more on the interplay between user and technology to understand the design options we actually have. In this contribution we first present our research concept based on the mapping of relations between users and technology, and we then describe the challenges for privacy frameworks and privacy metrics involved in this approach.