An Investigation into Facebook Friend Grouping

Abstract

With increasingly large friend networks, Facebook users may be losing sight of exactly with whom they are sharing content they post to Facebook. When Facebook released a new privacy interface in summer 2010 they simplified privacy controls; however, group-based permissions remain at the core of fine-grained privacy control. In order to use these fine-grained controls, users must be able to accurately and usefully specify friend groups. In a series of 46 semi-structured interviews, we investigated how participants group their online friends using four different grouping methods. Our results show that these different mechanisms alter the strategies and groups that users create, that groups created a priori need further refinement before they can adequately address privacy decisions, and that users are adapting their online behavior to avoid the need to specify groups in the current Facebook interface. We conclude with several recommendations that would allow users improved group-based access control.