An expectancy violation is defined as an incongruity
between a profile's intended audience and its expected
audience. Interestingly, expectancy violations by outsiders
were not significantly associated with having friends-only
profile. Expectancy violations by weak ties, on the other
hand, were associated with having a friends-only profile.
This finding highlights the variable saliency of networkbased
privacy concerns in social network sites. In a
network like Facebook, where strong and weak ties are
heavily saturated, expectancy violations may arise at the
periphery of the saturated network, rather than with
outsiders. In this sense, the lived experience of interaction
with weak ties may trump violations by hypothetical
outsiders. This finding can be modeled in network-based
systems to identify the point at which expectancy violations
may produce harms. Dynamic and granular privacy
controls that adapt to the functional periphery of tie
boundaries would be a useful application of this finding.