In the last few years, Online Social Networks (OSN) have experienced growth in the number of users, becoming an increasingly embedded part of people’s daily lives. Privacy expectations of OSNs are higher as more members start realizing potential privacy problems they face by interacting with these systems. Inspection methods can be an effective alternative for addressing privacy problems because they detect possible defects that could be causing the system to behave in an undesirable way. Therefore, we proposed a set of privacy inspection techniques called PIT-OSN (Privacy Inspection Techniques for Online Social Network). This paper presents the description and evolution of PIT-OSN through the results of a preliminary empirical study. We discuss the quantitative and qualitative results and their impact on improving the techniques. Results indicate that our techniques assist non-expert inspectors uncover privacy problems effectively, and are considered easy to use and useful by the study participants. Finally, the qualitative analysis helped us improve some technique steps that might be unclear.
An Empirical Study on the Privacy Preservation of Online Social Networks