At the time we deployed the survey, Facebook allowed
users to manage the privacy settings of uploaded content
(photos, videos, statuses, links and notes) using five different granularities: Only Me, Specific People, Friends Only,
Friends of Friends, and Everyone.2 Specific People allows
users to explicitly choose friends (or pre-created friend lists,
discussed below) to share content with. The default or
“recommended” privacy setting for all content is Everyone,
meaning users share their content with all 750 million Face-
book users [7] if they decline to modify their privacy settings.
Facebook allows users to re-use Specific People privacy
settings via friend lists. Users create a friend list, add a
subset of their friends to it, name it, and can then select the
list as a basis for privacy control. Friend lists are private to
the user who creates them, unless the user explicitly chooses
to display them as part of his profile.
The granularity of privacy settings varies according to con-
tent type. Photos are grouped into albums, and privacy set-
tings are specified on an album granularity (i.e., all photos
in an album must have the same privacy setting). For the
remaining content types, users can specify different privacy
settings for each piece of content.