Privacy Practices & Policies in Online Social Networks

This research is really insightful and relevant to so many people. Well done Joseph Bonneau & Sören Preibusch at the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge.

From the abstract of the paper:

We have conducted the first thorough analysis of the market for privacy practices and policies in online social networks. From an evaluation of 45 social networking sites using 260 criteria we find that many popular assumptions regarding privacy and social networking need to be revisited when considering the entire ecosystem instead of only a handful of well-known sites.
Impressive!

One of the more interesting things in this research is this amazing world social networking map listing the popular social networking sites in each country.



Social Network map of the world:


Here's a summary of the results for those of you interested. The following is a ranking of the most popular social networks by their 'Privacy Score'. Bebo scores best (quite fittingly) while Badoo (unsurprisingly!) is last of the lot.

Facebook is frustratingly middle of the pack when one would have expected it to have led by example.

On the other hand, Linkedin ranks second, which is impressive and probably one of the bigger reasons why it is the most popular business network on the web.

1 Bebo (0.7)
2 LinkedIn (0.7)
3 Gaia Online (0.69)
4 Habbo (0.66)
5 meinVZ (0.65)
6 Xanga (0.65)
7 Last.fm (0.64)
8 LiveJournal (0.62)
9 PerfSpot (0.61)
10 Ning (0.59)
11 Plaxo (0.58)
12 Windows Live Spaces (0.58)
13 Imeem (0.55)
14 Facebook (0.53)
15 XING (0.52)
16 Classmates.com (0.51)
17 CyWorld (0.51)
18 Orkut (0.51)
19 MocoSpace (0.49)
20 Twitter (0.49)
21 Yonja (0.49)
22 hi5 (0.48)
23 MySpace (0.48)
24 Hyves (0.47)
25 BlackPlanet (0.46)
26 Eons (0.46)
27 Imbee (0.46)
28 Experience Project (0.44)
29 Flixster (0.44)
30 Friendster (0.44)
31 NetLog (0.44)
32 Kaioo (0.43)
33 Viadeo (0.41)
34 Nexopia (0.4)
35 BuzzNet (0.37)
36 Bahu (0.35)
37 Multiply (0.34)
38 MyYearbook (0.33)
39 SkyRock (0.31)
40 Impulse (0.3)
41 Sonico (0.3)
42 Tagged (0.3)
43 MyLife (0.28)
44 CouchSurfing (0.26)
45 Badoo (0.23)

For more details, to download the research paper and the summaries, please visit this page.



Comments

  1. Interesting post.

    This one's also insightful, particularly the graph.

    http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/social_networks_growing_while_other_social_media_sites_stagnate_and_decline.php

    ReplyDelete

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