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The Social Web as a Shelter for Privacy and Authentic Living

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Abstract

Social network sites are known for intruding their users’ privacy per default. The networks use and sell demographic information for targeted advertising (Acquisti et al. 2007). Data are replicated by users and transferred to unknown third parties; the user’s utterances (e.g., on fan pages) are searched, analyzed, and scaled in market research (Nissenbaum 2009). Although users seem to be aware of this situation, the majority of users do not complain or change their self-disclosure online (boyd and Hargittai 2010, p. 320; Christofides et al. 2009). We find a very loose and laissez-faire behavior in terms of how users deal with the threats to and their own concerns about informational privacy online. Scholars have termed this contradiction the “privacy paradox,” indicating that people seem to know about privacy threats on the one hand, but do not enact their privacy needs on the other (Barnes 2006).

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Correspondence to Sabine Trepte .

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Trepte, S., Reinecke, L. (2011). The Social Web as a Shelter for Privacy and Authentic Living. In: Trepte, S., Reinecke, L. (eds) Privacy Online. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21521-6_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21521-6_6

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