Instructional awareness : a user-centred approach for risk communication in social network sites
This thesis focuses in the development of an adaptive approach for generating privacy awareness in SNSs. Particularly, in the elaboration of software artefacts for communicating those privacy risks that may occur when disclosing private information in SNSs. Overall, this covers two main aspects: knowledge extraction and knowledge application. Artefacts for knowledge extraction include the data structures and methods necessary to represent and elicit risky self-disclosure scenarios in SNSs. In this work, privacy heuristics (PHs) are introduced as an alternative for representing such scenarios and as fundamental instruments for the generation of adaptive privacy awareness. Alongside, the artefacts corresponding to knowledge application comprise those methods and algorithms that leverage the information contained inside PHs to shape the corresponding interventions. This includes methods for estimating the risk impact of a self-disclosure act and mechanisms for regulating the content and frequency of warning messages. All of these artefacts collaborate with each other in a conceptual framework that this thesis calls Instructional Awareness.