Although privacy problems in Social Network Sites (SNS) have become more salient than ever in recent years, interpersonal privacy issues in SNS remain understudied. This study aims to generate insights in understanding users' interpersonal privacy concerns by expounding interpersonal privacy boundaries in SNS. Through a case analysis of Friendship Pages on Facebook, this paper identifies users' interpersonal privacy concerns that are rooted from informational norms outlined in the theory of contextual integrity, as well as the tensions that occur within and cross these informational norms. This paper concludes with a discussion of design implications and future research.

Integrative analysis and modeling of the omics data using systems biology have led to growing interests in the development of predictive and personalized medicine. Personalized medicine enables future physicians to prescribe the right drug to the right patient at the right dosage, by helping them link each patient’s genotype to their specific disease conditions. This chapter shares technological, ethical, and social perspectives on emerging personalized medicine applications. First, it examines the history and research trends of pharmacogenomics, systems biology, and personalized medicine. Next, it presents bioethical concerns that arise from dealing with the increasing accumulation of biological samples in many biobanking projects today. Lastly, the chapter describes growing concerns over patient privacy when large amount of individuals’ genetic data and clinical data are managed electronically and accessible online.

While the body of privacy research on online social networks has been growing over the past several years, privacy problems emerged from the dynamism inherent in the launch of new features or interfaces have not been widely discussed. Drawing on the grounded theory approach, we aim to fill this gap by investigating the trigger conditions under which users may perceive the introduction of a new IT artifact as privacy threats. With the specific case of the New Profile introduced by Facebook, we conducted a content analysis of user responses posted on the official blog of Facebook. Results can be constructed as a process model including two stages. The first stage of the model presented four broad categories of trigger conditions of privacy concerns–information processing, increased accessibility, intrusion, and loss of control. The second stage describes three types of outcomes, including psychological outcomes, behavior outcomes, and suggested privacy mechanisms.

The feature of See Friendship was launched in late Oct 2010, which chronicles the history of social interactions between two friends (e.g., wall conversations, photos both are tagged in, comments they share, and mutual friends, etc). As soon as this new feature automatically replaced prior Wall-to-Wall feature on Facebook, it triggered users’ privacy concerns, discontent, anxiety, as well as mass media’s questioning of privacy breach. In this research, we conducted two stages of studies to examine interpersonal privacy concerns surrounding this feature. By applying a user-centered design approach, we first investigated users' privacy needs and expectations through a qualitative study, followed by our proposed new interface designs for privacy control options and evaluation. Our results highlight the tension between users' social needs and interpersonal privacy that involves peers' information privacy. This work provides preliminary conceptual and empirical insights in terms of design implications to address the tensions in interpersonal information privacy management.

Privacy is widely viewed as an interpersonal boundary regulation process in the context of online social networks (OSNs). Mediated by technologies provided by the OSNs, users manage both identity information and social relationships on OSNs. While previous studies mainly focus on users’ information sharing and disclosure behaviors from an individual perspective, this work looks into the social nuances of users’ interactional privacy concerns within their social circles from an interpersonal perspective. Through a case analysis of launching “Friendship Pages” by Facebook, we aim to examine the trigger conditions under which users perceive the launch of such feature to aggregate interpersonal interactions as privacy problems. This work calls for more research in conceptualizing and measuring users’ interpersonal privacy concerns in the context of OSNs. We conclude this work with a discussion on research challenges in support of mitigating users’ interpersonal concerns in OSNs.

In this paper, we aim at providing conceptual and empirical insights to the design of security indicators in web browsers. In examining why security indicators in web browsers fail to warn users about web frauds, we propose affordance-based principles for our new design of web authentication indicators. Following these principles, we present a new design for Extended Validation (EV) certificate interface in the Firefox browser. We then conduct an exploratory qualitative study to evaluate three different versions of EV indicators. Our findings offer some preliminary implications for the designs of more effective web authentication indicators.

The article presents the results of research on location awareness marketing, using methods such as global positioning systems and cellular triangulation techniques. Trade-offs between privacy and marketing effectiveness are addressed. An overview of related previous studies is provided, along with details of the research protocol, which involved a scenario-based survey involving more than 500 university students. It was found that covert location awareness marketing involved greater privacy risk, but achieved higher levels of personalization.

Location-Based Services (LBS) bring unprecedented mobility and personalization value to nomadic individuals and hence carry great commercial potential. However, the commercial potential of LBS is obscured by the user's concerns for privacy whereby the LBS provider can misuse the confidential personal information of users and in extreme circumstances place an individual in danger or seriously jeopardize his or her social life or finances. Therefore, we study the adoption of LBS through a privacy calculus lens. Privacy calculus argues that individuals, when requested to provide personal information to corporations, perform a cost-benefit analysis to assess the outcomes they would face in return for the information, and respond accordingly. We study both pull-based and push-based LBS to have a comprehensive view of LBS adoption. The results of the study reveal that individual's privacy concerns influence their intention to adopt directly in case of push-based LBS and indirectly in case of pull-based services. The implications for theory and practice are discussed.