In contrast, tagging is a very transparent process to Facebook, and as a result, they are better able to assess their privacy concerns and act accordingly. Our participants have fairly accurate mental models of how their information is shared through tagging with friends, and thus their level of privacy concern is a significant factor in how they engage with friends in this manner, not the effectiveness of Facebook’s privacy policy. Instead of placing the onus on Facebook’s
privacy policy to protect them from potential privacy breaches from tagging, our participants seemed to understand that their friends were responsible for confidant disclosures made through tagging. We believe that the theory of contextual integrity (Nissenbaum, 2004) helps explain the perceived privacy differences between engaging with friends through apps and tagging. When the flow of information between sender and recipient is not transparent, such as the case with apps, then contextual integrity of the information flow is compromised because the context by which information is gathered and disseminated is not clear to the individual (Nissenbaum, 2004). Therefore, in this case, SNS users may attribute privacy breaches to the SNS instead of to their friends. However, because tagging is transparent and directly tied to the responsible party, Facebook users can attribute confidant disclosure decisions directly to the individual who co-owns that tagged information.