See friendship: Interpersonal privacy management in a collective world

The feature of "See Friendship" was launched in late Oct 2010, which chronicles the history of social interactions between two friends (e.g., wall conversations, photos both are tagged in, comments they share, and mutual friends, etc). As soon as this new feature automatically replaced prior Wall-to-Wall feature on Facebook, it triggered users' privacy concerns, discontent, anxiety, as well as mass media's questioning of privacy breach. In this research, we conducted two stages of studies to examine interpersonal privacy concerns surrounding this feature. By applying a user-centered design approach, we first investigated users' privacy needs and expectations through a qualitative study, followed by our proposed new interface designs for privacy control options and evaluation. Our results highlight the tension between users' social needs and interpersonal privacy that involves peers' information privacy. This work provides preliminary conceptual and empirical insights in terms of design implications to address the tensions in interpersonal information privacy management.