Mass Media

Yet through changes Facebook introduced to its platform in 2009 and 2010, the social network actually succeeded in reversing some users' inclination to avoid public disclosure of their data.

This result “highlights the power of the environment in affecting individual choices,"

"The entity that controls the structure (in this case, Facebook), ultimately remains able to affect how actors make choices in that environment."

Between 2005 and 2009, Facebook users in the study exhibited “increasingly privacy-seeking behavior” and gradually limited what information could be seen by strangers. They grew more protective of all types of personal data

Then something surprising happened: Between 2009 and 2010, these privacy-aware people suddenly became more open with certain kinds of personal data. The researchers observed a “significant increase in the public sharing of various types of personal information.” (Emphasis theirs.)

concluded the reversal was, “with high probability,” caused by an update to the social network's privacy controls in December 2009 and the launch of Community Pages and Connected Profiles in April 2010, which made some previously private information about a user’s interests more widely visible.

Acquisiti, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon and one of the paper's authors, said the study’s findings call into question the merits of letting companies self-regulate on matters of user privacy. On Facebook, “users were taking charge [of their privacy],” he explained. “And yet things happened to push them to a higher level of disclosure than they’d expressed an interest in previously, or pushed them to disclose [information] to third parties that did not necessarily happen with users’ awareness or consent.”