The Taste for Privacy: An Analysis of College Student Privacy Settings in an Online Social Network

The rapid growth of contemporary social network sites (SNSs) has coincided with an increasing concern over personal privacy. College students and adolescents routinely provide personal information on profiles that can be viewed by large numbers of unknown people and potentially used in harmful ways. SNSs like Facebook and Myspace allow users to control the privacy level of their profile, thus limiting access to this information. In this paper, we take the preference for privacy itself as our unit of analysis, and analyze the factors that are predictive of a student having a private versus public profile. Drawing upon a new social network dataset based on Facebook, we argue that privacy behavior is an upshot of both social influences and personal incentives. Students are more likely to have a private profile if their friends and roommates have them; women are more likely to have private profiles than men; and having a private profile is associated with a higher level of online activity. Finally, students who have private versus public profiles are characterized by a unique set of cultural preferences-- of which the "taste for privacy" may only be a small but integral part.