Who's my audience again? Understanding audience management strategies for designing privacy management technologies

Social network site users are often confronted with invisible audiences. Although various settings for managing audiences are available, we argue that these do not always match the users' interpretations. This study explores the audience-management strategies of 18 young adults when categorizing their (invisible) audiences in Facebook, using card sorting as a research method. Approximately 1254 out of 1800 people (cards) were categorized based on the shared-community strategy, in which the participants referred to multiple community roles. The theoretical framework of Symbolic Interactionism and the Communication Privacy Management Theory are used to frame the problematic nature of invisible audiences. Implications for designing privacy-management technologies are discussed. Early research in the field of social network sites (SNSs) suggests that users are often unaware of privacy risks (Acquisti and Gross, 2006; Stutzman, 2006). Moreover, users' attitudes often seem to contradict their disclosure behavior. This has been labeled as the privacy paradox (Barnes, 2006). Recent studies, however, show a more positive development. More experience with SNSs has a positive effect on disclosure behavior (Lewis et al., 2008) and awareness (Christofides et al., 2009). Taking into account the positive features of SNSs, Tufekci (2008) indicates that American undergraduates try to optimize the boundary between publicity and privacy. Users are also increasingly making use of the available privacy settings when have been found. Various privacy-management strategies are used on SNSs. Lampinen et al. (2011) differentiate between preventive and corrective strategies, both on the individual and col-laborative levels, while boyd and Marwick (2011) emphasize teens' usage of social strategies (e.g., social steganography) next to structural ones (e.g., privacy settings). Although research indicates that more skills tend to stimulate privacy-enhancing behavior (boyd and Hargittai, 2010), many settings remain underused (Strater and Lipford, 2008) or fail to address the expectations of users (Liu et al., 2011). Furthermore , based on longitudinal data, Stutzman et al. (2012) found that network-driven changes in the interface settings of 0736-5853/$-see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.