Audience Segregation in Social Network Sites

Abstract

In recent years research has shown that most social network sites pose serious privacy and security risks for individual users. From the existing analyses of privacy and security risks in social network sites we deduce that one of the biggest categories of privacy risks revolves around the notion of ‘audience segregation’, i.e. the partitioning of different audiences and the compartmentalization of social spheres. Since audience segregation is an important mechanism in everyday interactions between people in the real world, we argue that social network sites ought to include this mechanism as well. Current social network sites lack this mechanism. We present Clique, a privacy-preserving social network site that provides ‘audience segregation’ to its users as an alternative.

Keywords: social network sites, audience segregation, privacy

JEL Classification: K10, K12