Analyzing settings for social identity management on Social Networking Sites: Classification, current state, and proposed developments

The rising prevalence of Social Networking Sites (SNS) and their usage in multiple contexts poses new privacy challenges and increasingly prompts users to manage their online identity. To address privacy threats stemming from interacting with other users on SNS, effective Social Identity Management (SIdM) is a key requirement. It refers to the deliberate and targeted disclosure of personal attribute values to a subset of one's contacts or other users on the SNS. Protection against other entities such as the site operator itself or advertisers and application programmers is not covered by SIdM, but could be incorporated in further refinement steps. Features and settings to perform SIdM have been proposed and subsequently implemented partly by some SNS. Yet, these are often isolated solutions that lack integration into a reference framework that states the requirements for successfully managing one's identity. In this article, such a reference framework of existing and desired SIdM settings is derived from identity theory, literature analysis, and existing SNS. Based thereupon, we examine the SIdM capabilities of prevalent SNS and highlight possible improvements. Lastly, we reason about developing a metric to objectively compare the capability of SNS in regards to their support for SIdM.