Improving Social Recommendations Through Privacy-Awareness

Contemporary Social Networking Services lack proper transparency and control features for users to understand and to efficiently steer the reach of their content and profile information, i.e. their online privacies. In this paper, we outline the problems and explain different access control mechanisms to approach this field. We briefly introduce our approach of a platform that provides privacy awareness by design and list a selection of the applied features for transparency and control. We report of a quantitative user survey which proved our platform to be understandable by users. Compared to conventional social networking services, users found it easier to understand both, whom is granted access to information, and how to control this. We show that through the provided and improved transparency and control our users sensed a) other users to be closer friends and b) content and social recommendations to be more relevant.