Stowe Boyd

Zoom

Privacy Management On Social Media Sites by Mary Madden via Pew

Social network users are becoming more active in pruning and managing their accounts. Women and younger users tend to unfriend more than others.

About two-thirds of internet users use social networking sites (SNS) and all the major metrics for profile management are up, compared to 2009: 63% of them have deleted people from their “friends” lists, up from 56% in 2009; 44% have deleted comments made by others on their profile; and 37% have removed their names from photos that were tagged to identify them.

How to read the ‘unfriending’ trend?

One option: This rise in unfriending might not be about friendship, per se. People might be just throttling back the torrent of information that they are receiving in their social streams: stream overload.

But the deleting of comments and removing name tags from photos would represent very different, and possibly more privacy-oriented motivations. However, if I delete a comment because someone writes something offensive, is that a privacy issue? Or is it a more of a cultivated image being publicly displayed? That would make it a publicy issue.

I think we will have to get a lot more fine-grained in determining causality in these cases, and more attuned to the publicy/Goffman angle: the presentation of self in everyday online life.