Xinru Page, Karen Tang, Fred Stutzman and I are organizing a two-day workshop on measuring networked social privacy at the CSCW 2013 conference next spring. We are inviting researchers from diverse backgrounds to come and work with us on what would it look like to “measure” networked social privacy in rigorous, productive ways. Please pass our CfP on to your networks, or even better, submit a position paper and join the endeavor!

Call for Participation

Measuring Networked Social Privacy: Qualitative & Quantitative Approaches

Social media plays an increasingly important role in interpersonal relationships and, consequently, raises privacy questions for end-users. However, there is little guidance or consensus for researchers on how to measure privacy in social media contexts, such as in social network sites like Facebook or Twitter. To this point, privacy measurement has focused more on data protection for end-users and used privacy scales like CFIP, IUIPC, and the Westin Segmentation Index. While these scales have been used for cross-study comparisons, they primarily emphasize informational privacy concerns and are less effective at capturing interpersonal and interactional privacy concerns.

Thus, there is a clear need to develop appropriate metrics and techniques for measuring privacy concerns in social media. Accomplishing such a goal requires knowledge of the current methods for measuring social privacy, as well as various existing interpersonal privacy frameworks. In this workshop, we will cultivate a common understanding of privacy frameworks, provide an overview of recent empirical work on privacy in social media, and encourage the development of consensus among the community on how to approach measuring social privacy for these networked, interpersonal settings. Our 2-day workshop will provide participants the opportunity to work more deeply on these issues, including opportunities to create and pilot new privacy measures, methods, and frameworks that will comprise a toolbox of techniques that can be used to study privacy concerns in social media.

We invite researchers from various domains to join this multidisciplinary workshop and address a number of key challenges in achieving this research vision. Some of these challenges include:

1. “Measuring” privacy: How should privacy be measured? Many studies run into the “privacy paradox” which points to how privacy concerns are not correlated with actual behavior. How should studies ensure that they are capturing untainted privacy concerns? How do we connect concerns with behavior?
2. Contextualizing privacy: How context-specific should privacy metrics be? How can we anticipate the types of social privacy concerns that will be most salient for different audiences? What types of situational context need to be captured in order to effectively capture interpersonal privacy concerns in social media?
3. Cross-study comparisons: How can general privacy measures be useful across different studies? What ways can we measure whether one privacy design is more effective than another in addressing social privacy concerns? How should context be considered when comparing privacy concerns across studies?
4. Integrating qualitative with quantitative: What is the role of various qualitative and quantitative methods in developing metrics? How can these methods complement each other? In which situations should a particular method, tool, and/or study design be used?
5. Integrating frameworks and metrics: How can we draw from existing privacy frameworks to contribute to our understanding of privacy in social media? What aspects of social privacy do these frameworks do a good job of capturing? What aspects of social privacy do these frameworks neglect to capture? How can we translate these privacy frameworks into a tool for capturing privacy concerns?

Interested parties should submit a position paper (2-4 pages in the Extended Abstracts format) by November 16, 2012, 11:59PM Pacific Standard Time.

We welcome a range of work including (but not limited to): (1) addressing one of the challenges described above, (2) experiences and/or case studies about measuring privacy and/or developing novel privacy frameworks, (3) lessons learned of what works and what doesn’t work when capturing social privacy concerns, (4) challenges to established assumptions about measuring privacy, and (5) ideas on novel directions in creating new privacy metrics and frameworks.

All submissions should be made in English. Our program committee will peer-review submissions and evaluate participants based on their potential to contribute to the workshop goals and discussions. At least one author of each accepted paper must register for the workshop.

Important dates

• Submission deadline – November 16, 2012
• Notification of acceptance – December 11, 2012
• Workshop at CSCW 2013 – February 23-24, 2013

In all issues related to the workshop, please contact us by e-mail at networkedprivacy(at)gmail.com