Heather Richter Lipford

Improving Privacy on Social Network Sites

Users of social network sites have a variety of mechanisms and features that they use for managing their privacy, such as choosing who to friend, how to group friends, and with whom to share photos. Yet, while users are considering what is safe and acceptable to share, they can easily overlook the reach of their information and accidentally disclose more than intended. To cope, users employ a variety of behaviors outside of the interface, such as self-censoring or only posting positive thoughts. We have developed a number of prototypes to manage the privacy of various aspects of social network sites, such as profile privacy settings, photos, and third party applications. For each of these, we sought to provide users with greater awareness of how information is being shared, and greater control over that sharing.

Publications

Pamela Wisniewski, A.K.M. Najmul Islam, Heather Richter Lipford, and David Wilson. Framing and Measuring Multi-Dimensional Interpersonal Privacy Preferences of Social Networking Site Users. Communications of the Association of Information Systems, 38, January 2016.
Pamela Wisniewski, Heather Richter Lipford, Heng Xu, Emmanuel Bello-Ogunu. Facebook Apps and Tagging: The Trade-off between Personal Privacy and Engaging with Friends. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology.
Gordon Hull, Heather Richter Lipford, and Celine Latulipe. Contextual Gaps: Privacy Issues on Facebook. Journal on Ethics in Information Technologies, Springer Science + Business Media, 13(4), 2011.
Jason Watson, Andrew Besmer, and Heather Richter Lipford. +Your Circles: Sharing Behavior on Google+. In the Proceedings of the Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS 2012), July 2012.
Pamela Karr-Wisniewski, Heather Richter Lipford, and David Wilson. Fighting for My Space: Coping Mechanisms for SNS Boundary Regulation. In the Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2012), May 2012.
Pamela Karr Wisniewski, Heather Richter Lipford, and David Wilson. A New Social Order: Boundary Regulation within Online Social Networks. In the Proceedings of the Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS), August 2011.
Andrew Besmer and Heather Richter Lipford. Users (Mis) Conceptions of Social Applications. In the Proceedings of Graphics Interface (GI 2010), June 2010, pp 63-70.
Andrew Besmer and Heather Richter Lipford. Moving Beyond UnTagging: Photo Privacy in a Tagged World. In the Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2010, April 2010, pp 1563-1572.
Heather Richter Lipford, Jason Watson, Michael Whitney, Katherine Froiland, and Robert W. Reeder. Visual vs. Compact: A Comparison of Privacy Policy Interfaces. In the Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2010, April 2010. pp 1111-1114.
Jason Watson, Michael Whitney, and Heather Richter Lipford. Configuring Audience-Oriented Privacy Policies. In the Proceedings the Workshop on Assurable and Usable Security Configurations (SafeConfig), collocated with ACM CCS 2009, November 2009, pp 71-78.
Heather Richter Lipford, Gordon Hull, Celine Latulipe, Andrew Besmer, and Jason Watson. Visual Flows: Contextual Integrity and the Design of Privacy Mechanisms on Social Network Sites. In the Proceedings of the Workshop on Security and Privacy in Online Social Networking, IEEE International Conference on Social Computing (SocialCom), August 2009, pp 985-989.
Andrew Besmer, Heather Richter Lipford, Mohammed Shehab, and Gorrell Cheek. Social Applications: Exploring a More Secure Framework. In the Proceedings of the Fifth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS), July 2009.
Katherine P. Strater and Heather Richter Lipford. Strategies and Struggles with Privacy in an Online Social Networking Community. In the Proceedings of 22nd British HCI Group Annual Conference on HCI 2008, September 2008, pp 111-120.
Heather Richter Lipford, Andrew Besmer, and Jason Watson. Understanding Privacy Settings in Facebook with an Audience View. In the Proceedings of the USENIX Workshop on Usability, Psychology and Security, April, 2008.