Over the last decade, personal data has established itself as a success factor for new business models by transforming existing markets or reducing transaction costs. As users surf the web, shop online, catch up on the latest news, and make valuable connections, their digital traces are meticulously tracked, collected, and aggregated by numerous actors on the web. For example, a comprehensive study by Roesner et al. (2012) identified a rich ecosystem of over 500 web trackers that monitor and share information about users across the Internet.

In the context of social media, the number of user profiles has a direct impact on business valuation, suggesting that user data can increasingly be seen as an important component of the new digital economy. On platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, users contribute directly to the success of the platform by publicly sharing their emotions, ideas and interests. Other valuable information is "likes" and "reshares." On Facebook alone, for example, 135,000 photos are uploaded every minute (Campbell 2014). This shared information allows such platforms to create an accurate profile of their members, which is used as a basis for personalized advertising. Considering that high user privacy concerns are reported worldwide, the high information disclosure on the web is paradoxical. While providers and markets can clearly assign a monetary value for user-supplied information, underlying motivations for user sharing remain an unsolved research puzzle. 

Increasingly, research findings suggest that we need more comprehensive theories and, fundamentally, better understanding to better explain users' attitudes and behaviors in the context of privacy-related decisions. This could help policymakers and platform providers design new "nudging" solutions to help users make more informed decisions when it comes to their privacy. 

In particular, our research addresses the following questions: How do users define privacy in the context of social media? What value do users place on the information they share? What specific privacy risks do users consider in their decisions? What technical and regulatory solutions have the potential to help users make more informed decisions ("nudging")?

Preliminary work 

Krasnova H., Spiekermann S., Koroleva K., Hildebrand T. (2010) “Online Social Networks: Why We Disclose”, Journal of Information Technology (A), 25(2), Palgrave Macmillan. 

Krasnova H., Hildebrand T., Günther O. (2009) “Investigating the Value of Privacy on Online Social Networks: Conjoint Analysis”, International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS 2009), Phoenix, Arizona, USA. 

Krasnova, H., Eling, N., Abramova, O., Buxmann, P. (2014) „Dangers of ‘Facebook Login’ for Mobile Apps: Is There a Price Tag for Social Information?“, International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS 2014), Auckland, New Zealand. 

Krasnova H., Günther O., Spiekermann S., Koroleva K (2009) “Privacy Concerns and Identity in Online Social Networks”, Identity in the Information Society Journal, 2(1), Publisher: Springer Netherlands. 

Ermakova, T., Krasnova, H., Fabian, B. “Exploring the Impact of Readability of Privacy Policies on Users’ Trust”, European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS 2016), Istanbul, Turkey. 

Wagner, A., Wessels, N., Buxmann, P., Krasnova, H. „Putting a Price Tag on Personal Information – A Literature Review“, accepted to Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-51), January 3-6, 2018, Waikoloa, Hawaii, USA. 

Krasnova H., Veltri NF, Elgarah, W. (2014) “Effectiveness of Justice-Based Measures in Managing Trust and Privacy Concerns on Social Networking Sites: Intercultural Perspective”, Communications of the Association of Information Systems Journal, 35 (4). 

Krasnova, H., Eling, N., Schneider O., Wenninger, H., Widjaja, T., Buxmann, P. (2013) “Does This App Ask For Too Much Data? The Role of Privacy Perceptions in User Behavior Towards Facebook Applications And Permission Dialogs”, 21st European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS 2013), Utrecht, The Netherlands.

Sources 

Campbell, S. (2014) One minute on Facebook: 80,000 status updates. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/digital-media/10987473/Facebook-in-a-minute-80000-status-updates.html 

Roesner, F., Kohno, T., & Wetherall, D. (2012, April). Detecting and defending against third-party tracking on the web. In Proceedings of the 9th USENIX conference on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (pp. 12-12). USENIX Association.