The recent study “Silent Listeners: The Evolution of Privacy and Disclosure on Facebook” conducted by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University monitored the public disclosure (information visible to all) and private disclosure (information visible to Facebook friends) of personal data by more than 5,000 Facebook users during the time period 2005-2011. The researchers identified two opposing trends. Over time, Facebook users divulged less and less personal information such as birthdates, favorite books or political information to the public. On the other hand, the researchers also noticed a trend of revealing more personal information to Facebook friends. Apparently, there was a growing awareness of how public disclosures can compromise privacy, but users were also emboldened to reveal more personal information when they deemed their audience to be trustworthy. As the researchers correctly pointed out, these “private disclosures” are always available to Facebook itself, third-party apps and to advertisers, referred to as “silent listeners” by the researchers. This is a key point when it comes to privacy settings on social media websites. Users are able to control how much information is displayed to other individuals and future laws and regulations may protect users by curtailing disclosures to government agencies, but information disclosures to the company that provides the service itself and its corporate clients are often beyond our control.

The poll “Teens, Social Media and Privacy” conducted by the Pew Research Center confirmed this lack of concern about third-party access to personal data in a group of 632 teenagers. Overall, 60% of teenagers said that they were either not at all concerned or not too concerned about third-party access (such as advertisers or third-party apps) to their personal information. Only 9% were very concerned about it. Individual comments made by teenagers in a Pew focus group further underscore this cavalier attitude towards corporate access to personal data:

Male (age 16): “It’s mostly just bands and musicians that I ‘like’ [on Facebook], but also different companies that I ‘like’, whether they’re clothing or mostly skateboarding companies. I can see what they’re up to, whether they’re posting videos or new products… [because] a lot of times you don’t hear about it as fast, because I don’t feel the need to Google every company that I want to keep up with every day. So with the news feed, it’s all right there, and you know exactly.” Male (age 13): “I usually just hit allow on everything [when I get a new app]. Because I feel like it would get more features. And a lot of people allow it, so it’s not like they’re going to single out my stuff. I don’t really feel worried about it.”

This is an excerpt from a longer essay on privacy published at 3Quarksdaily. Please click here for the complete essay.



Fred Stutzman, Ralph Gross, & Alessandro Acquisti (2012). Silent Listeners: The Evolution of Privacy and Disclosure on Facebook Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality, 4 (2)