Studying the Effects of SNS Users’ Alternative Privacy Strategies With an Activity Tracking Tool

We demonstrate how our methodological approach helps to understand social network sites (hereinafter SNS) users‘ alternative privacy strategies. To this end, we refer to one of our recent empirical studies and describe the effects of users’ avoidance of provided privacy controls. Many studies document that users rarely use Facebook’s friendlist feature because they consider creating, maintaining and applying lists as too burdensome and, thus, prefer to employ alternative strategies, such as withholding information. Based on our empirical results, we suggest to focus on the improvement of tools which do not require much a priori rule setting and could be easily adjusted at the moment of sharing.