Typical User Behavior and Social Network Responsibility
Social networks offer many privacy settings. (Read descriptions of Facebook's default settings at "Default Settings" .) However, users seldom bother to change them. A study on 4,500 Carnegie Mellon students found that only 1.2% had changed their settings so that they could only be found by other CMU students in a Facebook search. Only 3 students (0.067%) bothered to restrict people they were not friends with from viewing their profiles.
In addition, users often feel overly safe online. The same study reported that someone who had written an automatic script to send friend requests to 250,00 people had 75,000 successes. That is troubling, because it is possible to refine a phishing attack with the information found in a Facebook profile. Even more frighteningly, the default setting for Facebook is to display one's hometown and birthday, which are two pieces of information needed to generate one's Social Security number.
Users should clearly be more responsible about what privacy settings they choose, but many may not be aware of the privacy issues at stake. Users need to become more educated, but social networks need to deal with the realities of user behavior, and not wish for ideal behavior. Since users tend not to change their settings, social networks should restrict default privacy settings more and remind users to change them.
Sometimes users do try to protect themselves as best they can and a social network fails to do its part. A study on teenagers using MySpace found that 66% of them limited profile access, and that approximately half of those with public profiles gave false information. Setting one's profile to be private isn't entirely effective on MySpace though; even a completely private profile will still show some personal information, such one's first name, gender, and hometown. An example of such a profile is below.
Not only should social networks offer more restrictive default settings, but they should also enough settings to allow users to hide themselves as much as they want from whomever they wish.