Analyzing and Predicting Privacy Settings in the Social Web

Social networks provide a platform for people to connect and share information and moments of their lives. With the increasing engagement of users in such platforms, the volume of personal information that is exposed online grows accordingly. Due to carelessness, unawareness or difficulties in defining adequate privacy settings, private or sensitive information may be exposed to a wider audience than intended or advisable, potentially with serious problems in the private and professional life of a user. Although these causes usually receive public attention when it involves companies’ higher managing staff, athletes, politicians or artists, the general public is also subject to these issues. To address this problem, we envision a mechanism that can suggest users the appropriate privacy setting for their posts taking into account their profiles. In this paper, we present a thorough analysis of privacy settings in Facebook posts and evaluate prediction models that can anticipate the desired privacy settings with high accuracy, making use of the users’ previous posts and preferences.

Authors: Kaweh Djafari Naini, Ismail Sengor Altingovde, Ricardo Kawase, Eelco Herder, Claudia Niederée

PDF: naini-umap2015.pdf

Haters gonna hate: job-related offenses in Twitter

In this paper, we aim at finding out which users are likely to publicly demonstrate frustration towards their jobs on the microblogging platform Twitter – we will call these users haters. We show that the profiles of haters have specific characteristics in terms of vocabulary and connections. The implications of these findings may be used for the development of an early alert system that can help users to think twice before they post potentially self-harming content.

Authors: Ricardo Kawase, Patrick Siehndel, and Eelco Herder

PDF: kawase-www2014

FireMe! Website: http://fireme.l3s.uni-hannover.de/

Who wants to get fired?

Ricardo Kawase presenting @WEBSCI2013

Microblogging services like Twitter have witnessed a flood of users and short updates (tweets). Although this phenomenon brings new possibilities of communication, it also brings dangerous consequences. From time to time, people post tweets guided by strong emotions. By default, tweets are public and anyone, anywhere can instantly see your updates, creating high exposure and lack of awareness about privacy issues. In many cases, this may lead to consequences that can be harmful to one’s personal and professional life. In this paper, we investigate the posting behavior of people who tweet that they hate their jobs and bosses and their responses to alerts about the potential damage that such a tweet may cause. We show that, in many cases, people are not aware about the dimension of their audience, and once alerted, they often regret what they have publicly said. Our analysis leads us to believe that many users could benefit from a ‘give a second thought before posting’ tool that may save their jobs.

Authors:  Ricardo Kawase, Bernardo Pereira Nunes, Eelco Herder, Wolfgang Nejdl and Marco Antonio Casanova

PDF: kawase-websci2013

FireMe! Website: http://fireme.l3s.uni-hannover.de/