Friend-to-Friend Privacy Protection on Social Networking Sites: A Grounded Theory Study

Individual privacy settings allow members of Social Networking Sites (SNS) to share personal data with specifically selected contacts, such as close friends. This allows members to use SNS for sharing even more private data they would otherwise not want to share with all of their contacts. Although a considerable part of data sharing activities on SNS is limited to the direct contacts of its members, current research lacks insights on use and design of individual privacy settings. In this paper we investigate driving and inhibiting factors which explain the motivation of SNS members to use individual privacy settings. Thereby, we contribute a new facet to the general understanding of privacy protection behavior on SNS and also lay the ground for improving the design of individual privacy settings offered by SNS providers. We have drawn our results from a conducted grounded theory study based on 37 qualitative interviews with Facebook users.