The PViz comprehension tool for social network privacy settings

Users' mental models of privacy and visibility in social networks often involve subgroups within their local networks of friends. Many social networking sites have begun building interfaces to support grouping, like Facebook's lists and "Smart Lists," and Google+'s "Circles." However, existing policy comprehension tools, such as Facebook's Audience View, are not aligned with this mental model. In this paper, we introduce PViz, an interface and system that corresponds more directly with how users model groups and privacy policies applied to their networks. PViz allows the user to understand the visibility of her profile according to automatically-constructed, natural sub-groupings of friends, and at different levels of granularity. Because the user must be able to identify and distinguish automatically-constructed groups, we also address the important sub-problem of producing effective group labels. We conducted an extensive user study comparing PViz to current policy comprehension tools (Facebook's Audience View and Custom Settings page). Our study revealed that PViz was comparable to Audience View for simple tasks, and provided a significant improvement for complex, group-based tasks, despite requiring users to adapt to a new tool. Utilizing feedback from the user study, we further iterated on our design, constructing PViz 2.0, and conducted a follow-up study to evaluate our refinements.