Shujaat Mirza, Christina Pöpper (New York University)

Online social networks accumulate unprecedented amounts of data that continue to exist on user profiles long after the time of posting. Given that these platforms primarily provide a venue for people to connect and foster online friendships, the influence and the risks associated with longitudinal data may impact users and their reasons for using these platforms. To better understand these issues, we conducted two user studies of Facebook users analyzing the history of past postings w. r. t. to their perceived relevance, longitudinal exposure, and impact on the users’ befriending behavior. The studies give us a cross-cultural undergraduate student sample (n=89, campus study) and a Mechanical Turk sample of two cultural backgrounds from the US and India (n=209, MTurk study). Our findings reveal that a sizable group of participants consider their past postings irrelevant and, at times, embarrassing. However, participants’ awareness and usage of longitudinal privacy control features (e. g., Limit Past Posts) are limited, resulting in overexposure of their past postings and personal information. Importantly, we find support that these overexposed, yet irrelevant, past postings (of both participants and friend requesters) have the potential to influence users’ fundamental behavior on the platform: friend network expansion. Participants greatly valued friend requester’s past postings, particularly in the absence of prior personal interactions, but are influenced by their backgrounds (American users rely significantly more than their Indian counterparts on the requesters’ past postings for their befriending behavior). We close by discussing the implications of our findings on the future of longitudinal privacy controls.

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Evan Johnson (University of California San Diego), David Thien (University of California San Diego), Yousef Alhessi (University of California San Diego), Shravan Narayan (University Of California San Diego), Fraser Brown (Stanford University), Sorin Lerner (University of California San Diego), Tyler McMullen (Fastly Labs), Stefan Savage (University of California San Diego), Deian Stefan (University of California…

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An Analysis of First-Party Cookie Exfiltration due to CNAME...

Tongwei Ren (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), Alexander Wittmany (University of Kansas), Lorenzo De Carli (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), Drew Davidsony (University of Kansas)

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David Butler, Chris Hicks, James Bell, Carsten Maple, and Jon Crowcroft (The Alan Turing Institute)

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Jeremy Daily, David Nnaji, and Ben Ettlinger (Colorado State University)

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