The problems that arise in OSNs, and proposed a diverse range of “privacy solutions”. These include software tools and design principles to address OSN privacy issues. Each of these solutions is developed with a specific type of user, use, and privacy problem in mind. This has had some positive effects: we now have a broad spectrum of approaches to tackle the complex privacy problems of OSNs. At the same time, it has led to a fragmented landscape of solutions that address seemingly unrelated problems. As a result, the vastness and diversity of the field remains mostly inaccessible to outsiders, and at times even to researchers within computer science who are specialized in a specific privacy problem. One of the objectives of this paper is to put these approaches to privacy in OSNs into perspective. They distinguish three types of privacy problems that researchers in computer science tackle. The first approach addresses the “surveillance problem” that arises when the personal information and social interactions of OSN users are leveraged by governments and service providers. The second approach addresses those problems that emerge through the necessary renegotiation of boundaries as social interactions get mediated by OSN services, in short called “social privacy”. The third approach addresses problems related to users losing control and oversight over the collection and processing of their information in OSNs, also known as “institutional privacy”. Each of these approaches abstracts away some of the complexity of privacy in OSNs in order to focus on more solvable questions. Researchers working from different perspectives differ not only in what they abstract, but also in their fundamental assumptions about what the privacy problem is. OSN providers have access to all the user generated content and the power to decide who may have access to which information. This may lead to social privacy problems, e.g., OSN providers may increase content visibility in unexpected ways by overriding existing privacy settings. Thus, a number of the privacy problems users experience with their “friends” may not be due to their own actions, but instead result from the strategic design changes implemented by the OSN provider. If we focus only on the privacy problems that arise from misguided decisions by users, we may end up deemphasizing the fact that there is a central entity with the power to determine the accessibility and use of information.
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