Cars, Condoms, and Facebook

Participation on Online Social Networks (OSNs) inherently requires information sharing and thus exposes individuals to privacy risks. Risk mitigation then has been encouraged through adoption of usable privacy controls. However, stronger privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) decrease both risk and perceptions of risk. Thus, individuals feel safer and may in fact respond by accepting more risk. Such perverse results have been observed offline, e.g. automobile safety, HIV prevention. Risk perception offline has been understood to be a function of characteristics of the risks involved rather than as a calculus grounded only in the probability of the risk and the magnitude of harm. In this work we use nine characteristics of risk from a classic and proven offline model of perceived risk to conduct a survey based evaluation of perceptions of privacy risks on Facebook. We find that these dimensions of risk provide a statistically significant explanation of the perceived risk of information sharing on Facebook. Our results indicate that more knowledge about privacy violations may lower risk perceptions; thus, we argue for public campaigns grounded in risk communication with a focus on severity of consequences of information sharing.