Oops, I did it again

We performed a study of Facebook users to examine how they coped with limitations of the Facebook privacy settings interface. Students graduating and joining the workforce create significant problems for all but the most basic privacy settings on social networking websites. We therefore created realistic scenarios exploiting work/play boundaries that required users to specify access control policies that were impossible due to various limitations. We examined whether users were aware of these problems without being prompted, and once given feedback, what their coping strategies were. Overall, we found that simply alerting participants to potential errors was ineffective, but when choices were also presented, participants introduced significantly fewer errors. Based on our findings, we designed a privacy settings interface based on Venn diagrams, which we validated with a usability study. We conclude that this interface may be more effective than the current privacy settings interface.