Social networking sites like Facebook are rapidly
gaining in popularity. At the same time, they seem to
present significant privacy issues for their users. We analyze
two of Facebooks’s more recent features, Applications
and News Feed, from the perspective enabled by Helen
Nissenbaum’s treatment of privacy as ‘‘contextual integrity.’’
Offline, privacy is mediated by highly granular social
contexts. Online contexts, including social networking
sites, lack much of this granularity. These contextual gaps
are at the root of many of the sites’ privacy issues.
Applications, which nearly invisibly shares not just a
users’, but a user’s friends’ information with third parties,
clearly violates standard norms of information flow. News
Feed is a more complex case, because it involves not just
questions of privacy, but also of program interface and of
the meaning of ‘‘friendship’’ online. In both cases, many of
the privacy issues on Facebook are primarily design issues,
which could be ameliorated by an interface that made the
flows of information more transparent to users.