Given the popularity of tagging and apps, we would like to further explain how they both facilitate confidant disclosures. Tagging someone on Facebook creates a link between a post or photo uploaded by one individual to the tagged person’s Facebook Timeline and News Feed, thereby sharing the tagged information with all of that person’s friends. By default, tagged posts and photos do not require a tagged user’s permission before sharing with his friends.
However, users are able to customize their privacy settings to disable tagging or require tag review. Apps, on the other hand, are created by third-party application developers and run on the Facebook platform to seamlessly provide additional functionality within Facebook. Given user permission when installing an app, apps can access and modify a user’s profile information and post on behalf of the user. Apps can also access information from a user’s “friends’” Facebook
profiles. Facebook users may not realize that, even if they do not use a Facebook app themselves, their friends are able to share pieces of their profile information without their expressed consent (Figure 1). Users can change their privacy settings so that friends’ apps cannot access their personal information, but as with tagging, these types of confidant
disclosures are enabled by default. Therefore, with no intervention by the user, this means that friends are automatically given autonomy over various types of personal information that a user may or may not want them to share with others.