The great Facebook privacy debate

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“This is a bit naïve by users,” Leenes said. “There are plenty of people interested in what people do. Parents, teachers, employers, governments…”

He added: “If ignorance is the case then we have to teach them about the risks. Sites should publish user-friendly community guidelines rather than terms and services.”

Ignorance might be true for some, but Leenes claimed that users by and large knew the privacy issues of social networking.

Many users also believe that they are addressing their friends rather than outsiders on the social network, and expect privacy in doing so, according to Leenes.

“It is a call for the re-establishment of the social more that you stay out of people’s conversations, unless you were invited to participate," he said.

The third reason suggested by Leenes is that users feel they have no choice, as leaving a social network could be ‘social suicide’. Sites like Facebook become a community where people get in touch with other, make friends and organise events so removing yourself from such a network could do more harm than good to some.

Leaving the social network could turn them into the outsider with no friends, according to Leenes. “They think social rather than logical," he said.

Is more technology the answer?

Social networks don’t look like they are going to stop growing any time soon, so what are the solutions, if any, to ensure some level of privacy?

Education and awareness could be an answer. Adding random strangers to your Facebook 'friends' list, for example, could be risky as you have no knowledge about who they really are.

This also comes with confidential data. It’s obviously not sensible to put details like addresses, phone numbers or any information that somebody could use to steal your identity into the realms of social network-based public forums.

However, there is also another option. Leene suggests that some may want to reject the social network model in favour of something more secure.

Unlike some commentators, Leene believes that there are some technical controls that users could adopt to deliver some degree of privacy in a social network without affecting its sociability.

“By developing technical tools to support concepts like audience segregation and contextual integrity," he said.

Social networks are built on the data mined from us. Leenes claims that if there was no data to mine, it would lose its value and users would, once again, be safe.

“Of course this may affect the business opportunity of platform providers, but hey, that’s not my problem,” he added.

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