Security & Privacy Support for Teenagers in Online Social Media

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As of October 2013, Facebook had more than 1.5 billion monthly active users, which is more people than most nations in the world. It is not surprising that the use of online social networks and other online social media (collectively referred to as OSM) has been taken up by a wide range of individuals and organizations. With so many different stakeholders, the issue of security and privacy for users of OSM has become an important, intriguing, and controversial subject. Whether they realize it or not, OSM users face numerous security and privacy threats. The insecure and unsafe use of OSM is a challenging and critical problem that has been attracting the attention of both practitioners and researchers. The problem is challenging because individual users are generally not properly trained and lack the necessary expertise. Some of them are simply too young; Facebook allows children as young as 13 years of age to join. Individual users also consider security to be a secondary task, have inadequate mental models of the security and privacy mechanisms they have to control and the risks they face, and have a tendency to also underestimate these risks. As a result, OSM users are not sufficiently equipped to protect themselves. Teenagers constitute about 7% of Facebook users (about 100 million users), and are collectively one of the most vulnerable user groups on OSM. The proposed research will focus on investigating the socio-technical means of protecting teenage users against threats raised by the use of OSM. I will be investigating both the mechanisms and their interfaces for supporting both the privacy and security needs of this user group. I will specifically focus on supporting teenagers of school age (i.e., 13-18 years old), as due to their lack of technical experience, personal maturity, and education on issues of privacy they are one of the most vulnerable user groups. To provide technological support to a specific user group, one first has to understand the motivations, needs and requirements of that user population. As such, I will first start with qualitative user studies to develop an understanding of the factors that drive teenagers to use OSMs and other social media sites, as well as the specific risks they face, and concerns they might have due to their OSM activities. My graduate students and I will conduct interviews with high school students. Focus groups will be also considered, although they might be less appropriate than individual interviews due to the sensitive nature of personal privacy when it comes to social media. The hypothesis and models developed from the literature review and interviews will be tested through surveys, questionnaires, laboratory experiments and other quantitative instruments. These steps will ground the technological investigation in models of teenagers' motivations and behaviour that are based on empirical data. The first aspect of security and privacy in the teens’ experience with using OSM that I will investigate is their acceptance of friendship requests from strangers. As we showed previously, Facebook users tend to accept friendship requests from the profiles of users they have never met before, with acceptance rates upwards of 80%. The risks of accepting such requests vary and may include privacy breaches, misinformation and surveillance. Once I gain an understanding of this population of OSM users, I will proceed towards an investigation of the kind of technology support that can be used to manage the security and privacy aspects of teenagers' experience with OSM. The mechanisms and user interfaces that my graduate students and I develop will be evaluated through laboratory studies, focus groups, and limited field studies of prototypes provided to study participants.