Not all privacy settings are created equal: evaluating social media privacy settings for personal and advertising purposes

Social media are heralded for their empowering effects on users both for self- expression and revolutions (boyd, 2007). The same companies are however also criticised for their privacy invasive ways of advertising and generating money out of personal data, since this is their main revenue stream (Cohen, 2008; Fuchs, 2011). These seemingly contradicting features of social media illustrate the discussion whether social media are empowering or not. However being targeted through personal data disclosed on social media does not have to interfere with spreading the word of an anti-regime demonstration. Social media can be both empowering and disempowering at the same time on different levels, of both the individual and society.
We do not describe social media as either an empowering or a disempowering medium. We situate commercial social media as companies with an economic profit- oriented goal and with a specific business model that will enable and disable certain settings at the user level. Social media are enabling mass self-communication (Arsenault & Castells, 2008), which gives users the ability to self-select, direct and receive messages on a mass medium scale. But these platforms also allow for a new form of labour: immaterial labour 2.0 (Cote & Pybus, 2007) that uses user generated content (UGC) and data for advertising purposes. Privacy can be conceptualised in two ways: (1) linked to the ability of managing an identity vis-a-vis other users (boyd, 2007) (as a subject) and (2) linked to the surveillance perspective wherein users are reduced to data (Gandy, 2003) (privacy as an object). In order to analyse the settings offered on social media we make use of the notion of 'affordances' (Norman, 1999).
We analyse all privacy settings to map the amount of user control or lack thereof for the aforementioned kinds of privacy. This research will reveal to what extent users can manage their privacy(s) and how this is coupled to social media business models. The research took place in the first semester of 2012 and consisted of a mapping of default privacy settings on three social media: Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. These results are part of the four-year interdisciplinary EMSOC project where social media and user empowerment are the main research focus.
Our first findings suggest that there are more settings to control subjective privacy both in a more fine-grained way and to a higher degree if compared to privacy settings related to advertising and interaction with third parties. Privacy settings are also limited in choices for subjective privacy if these messages can be used for new way of advertising like social advertising.
This paper therefore nuances the empowerment-disempowerment discussion on social media by moving it away from a dichotomous position. We also show the relevance of political economy analysis to better understand the limits of mass self- communication on the micro-level of a user's privacy.