Blogs are permeating most niches of social life, and addressing a wide range of topics from scholarly and political issues1 to family and children’s daily lives. By their very nature, blogs raise a number of privacy issues as they are easy to produce and disseminate, resulting in large amounts of sometimes personal information being broadcast across the Internet in a persistent and cumulative manner. This article reports the preliminary findings of an online survey of bloggers from around the world. The survey explored bloggers’ subjective sense of privacy by examining their blogging practices and their expectations of privacy when publishing online. The findings suggest that blogging offers individuals a unique opportunity to work on their self-identity via the degree of self-expression and social interaction that is available in this medium. This finding helps to explain why bloggers consciously bring the ‘private’ to the public realm, despite the inherent privacy risks they face in doing so.

When social networking sites give users granular control over their privacy settings, the result is that some content across the site is public and some is not. How might this content—or characteristics of users who post publicly versus to a limited audience—be different? If these differences exist, research studies of public content could potentially be introducing systematic bias. Via Mechanical Turk, we asked 1,815 Facebook users to share recent posts. Using qualitative coding and quantitative measures, we characterize and categorize the nature of the content. Using machine learning techniques, we analyze patterns of choices for privacy settings. Contrary to expectations, we find that content type is not a significant predictor of privacy setting; however, some demographics such as gender and age are predictive. Additionally, with consent of participants, we provide a dataset of nearly 9,000 public and non-public Facebook posts.

As social network sites grow and diversify in both users and content, tensions between users’ audience composition and their disclosure practices become more prevalent. Users must navigate these spaces carefully to reap relational benefits while ensuring content is not shared with unintended audiences. Through a qualitative study of highly engaged Facebook users, this study provides insight into how people conceptualize friendship online as well as how perceived audience affects privacy concerns and privacy management strategies. Findings suggest an increasingly complex relationship between these variables, fueled by collapsing contexts and invisible audiences. Although a diverse range of strategies are available to manage privacy, most participants in this sample still engaged in some degree of self-censorship.

In this digital world social media has become an essential part of our lives. Advanced communication technology borne social media has made our communicative experiences far better than in older times. It provides us a unique way to socially engage with one another's life. But on the other hand, it also exposes us silently before all. Social media now helps people to remain