Abstract
The findings of our experiments showed that social network sites (SNSs) such as Google Plus, Facebook, and Twitter, have the ability to acquire knowledge about their users’ movements not only within SNSs but also beyond SNS boundaries, particularly among websites that embedded SNS widgets such as Google’s Plus One button, Facebook’s Like button, and Twitter’s Tweet button. In this paper, we analysed the privacy implication of such a practice from a moral perspective by applying Helen Nissenbaum’s decision heuristic derived from her contextual integrity framework in order to answer the question of whether or not an online user’s privacy is being violated by this practice.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Acquisti, A., & Gross, R. (2006). Imagined communities: Awareness, information sharing and privacy on the Facebook. In P. Golle & G. Danezis (Eds.), Privacy enhancing technologies. Springer, Berlin.
Barocas, S., & Nissenbaum, H. (2009). In Proceedings of the engaging data forum: The first international forum on the application and management of personal electronic information. http://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/papers/ED_SII_On_Notice.pdf.
Barth, A., Datta, A., Mitchelle, J. C., & Nissenbaum, H. (2006). In 2006 IEEE symposium on security and privacy (pp. 15 –198). Berkeley/Oakland, CA: IEEE.
Boyd, D., & Ellison, N. B. (2007). Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(12), 210. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html.
Charnigo, L., & Barnett-Ellis, P. (2007). Checking out Facebook.com: The impact of a digital trend on academic libraries. Information Technology and Libraries, 26(1), 23.
Cheung, C. M. K., Chiu, P. Y., & Lee, M. K. O. (2011). Online social networks: Why do students use facebook? Computer in Human Behaviour 27, 1337.
Comer, D. E. (2000) Internetworking with TCP/IP. USA: Prentice Hall.
Facebook. (2011). Facebook developers: Like button. http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/.
Facebook. (2012a). Data use policy. http://www.facebook.com/about/privacy/.
Facebook. (2012b). Facebook: About. http://www.facebook.com/facebook/info.
Google. (2011). Plus one: Recommend on search, share on google +. http://www.google.com/+1/button/.
Google. (2012). Privacy policy. http://www.google.com/intl/en-GB/policies/privacy/.
Grodzinsky, F. S., & Tavani, H. T. (2010). Applying the contextual integrity model of privacy to personal blogs in the blogosphere. International Journal of Internet Research Ethics, 3(12).
Grodzinsky, F. S., & Tavani, H. T. (2011). Privacy in the cloud: Applying Nissenbaum’s theory of contextual integrity. SIGCAS Computers and Society 41(1), 38. doi:10.1145/2095266.2095270.
Hormozi, A. M. (2005). Cookies and privacy. UEDP 32, 1. http://pubget.com/paper/pgtmp_0546b9eb19bab1a955d7219154ec4381.
Hull, G., Lipford, H. R., & Latulipe, C. (2011). Contextual gaps: Privacy issues on Facebook. Ethics and Information Technology, 13(4), 289.
Joinson, A. N. (2008). In Proceedings of the twenty-sixth annual SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1027–1036). New York, NY: ACM CHI ’08. doi:10.1145/1357054.1357213.
Krishnamurthy, B., & Wills, C. E. (2010a). On the leakage of personally identifiable information via online social networks. SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 40, 112. doi:10.1145/1672308.1672328.
Krishnamurthy, B., & Wills, C. E. (2010b). In Proceedings of the 3rd conference on online social networks (p. 4). Berkeley, CA: USENIX Association. WOSN’10. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1863190.1863194.
Krishnamurthy, B., & Naryshkin, K. (2011). In Proceedings of the Web2.0 security and privacy workshop (pp. 1–10). Oakland, CA.
Kristol, D. M. (2001). HTTP Cookies: Standards, privacy, and politics. ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, 1, 151. doi:10.1145/502152.502153.
Lampe, C., Ellison, N., & Steinfield, C. (2006). A Face(book) in the crowd: Social searching vs. social browsing. New York: ACM Press.
Lucas, R., & Mason, N. (2008). A survey of ethics and regulation within the ICT industry in Australia: Ethics education. Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society, 6(4), 349.
Mayer, J. (2011). Tracking the trackers: Where everybody knows your username. http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node/6740.
Nissenbaum, H. (1997). Toward an approach to privacy in public: Challenges of information technology. Ethics and Behavior, 7(3), 207.
Nissenbaum, H. (1998). Protecting privacy in an information age: The problem of privacy in public. Law and Philosophy, 17, 559.
Nissenbaum, H. (2004). Privacy as contextual integrity. Washington Law Review Association, 79(1), 119.
Nissenbaum, H. (2010). Privacy in context: Technology, policy, and the integrity of social life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Nissenbaum, H. (2011). A contextual approach to privacy online. The Journal of the American Academy of Art and Sciences, 140(4), 32.
Pempek, T. A., Yermolayeva, Y. A., & Calvert, S. L. (2009). College students’ social networking experiences on Facebook. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 30(3), 227. http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0193397308001408.
Purcell, K. (2011). Search and email still top the list of most popular online activities. http://pewinternet.org//media//Files/Reports/2012/PIP_Digital_differences_041312.pdf.
Tavani, H. T. (2007). Philosophical theories of privacy: Implications for an adequate online privacy policy. Metaphilosophy, 38(1), 1. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9973.2006.00474.x.
Twitter. (2011). Twitter buttons. http://twitter.com/about/resources/buttons.
Twitter. (2012). Twitter privacy policy. https://twitter.com/privacy.
Twitter. (2013). Previous twitter privacy policies. http://twitter.com/privacy/previous.
Westin, A. F. (1966). Science, privacy, and freedom: Issues and proposals for the 1970’s. Part I—The current impact of surveillance on privacy. Columbia Law Review, 66(6), 1003.
Young, K. (2009). Online social networking: An Australian perspective. International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Society, 7(1), 39.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Sar, R.K., Al-Saggaf, Y. Contextual integrity’s decision heuristic and the tracking by social network sites. Ethics Inf Technol 16, 15–26 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-013-9329-y
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-013-9329-y