A Set of Privacy Inspection Techniques for Online Social Networks

The growing use of Online Social Networks (OSN) has encouraged the adoption of good practices in the design and evaluation of these applications to ensure their social acceptability and quality of use. On this way, privacy can be considered one of the determining factors of quality of use, because privacy discrepant interfaces can negatively influence the user's interaction with these systems. One way to support privacy assessment to detect potential problems is through inspection methods. Based on that, in this paper we present a set of privacy inspection techniques called PIT-OSN (Privacy Inspection Technique for Online Social Network). We also present the evaluation of PIT-OSN through of a preliminary study. The results indicated that the technique helped inspectors, not experts, to diagnose privacy issues effectively. PIT-OSN was also considered easy to use and useful by study participants. Finally, the qualitative analysis points out valuable inputs for the refinement of the technique and the opportunities for its improvement.