The Knot or The Noose? Analysis of Privacy on a Wedding Planning Web site
From Anita Borg Institute Wiki
Presenter: Katie A. Siek (University of Colorado at Boulder)
At any time, at least 2.4 million couples are planning their weddings. The Knot, an online wedding planning resource, helps couples plan their weddings with personalized online web-pages called bios. The amount of information varies in each bio, however some bios have enough information to help malicious third parties create phishing schemes, identity thefts, cancellation problems, and robberies. This paper presents a statistical analysis of privacy concerns for Knot members.
Juli James, GHC 2009 Live Notetaker
How does this research fit into a career scheme? Ms. Siek created DIMA (Dietary Intake Monitoring Application for Low Literacy Dialysis Patients). Also added interactive personal health record (PHR) for users to regularly update health information and provide it to doctors/hospitals (but dependent on users to regularly update). Explored both how users might add to this kind of a network and give users an understanding of how to protect privacy/security.
Began planning her wedding and started to look at the privacy issues related to wedding planning. The Knot: wedding planning and social networking site. Create community bios with information about wedding, users asking questions and sharing information. Users don't always protect privacy with using real names, bragging about location and wedding details. The Knot encourages this kind of user behavior with possible privacy implications. Ms. Siek used a profile from The Knot, subsequently "googled" the user and contacted and was able to share the information she found. Weddings have been canceled unbeknownst to the user from "pranksters." Other implications: phising schemes, identity theft, and robbery.
Created a survey to analyze privacy information and what users will post.
Take away points:
Why Knot members are disclosing their information? How they are and how can users be empowered to protect themselves. The Knot mentioned they desire this type of behavior (interesting relationship to the Coca-Cola/McDonald's phenomenon. Weddings begin to look the same and users desire similar things).
Questions:
If this was secure site would privacy issues be the same? Answer: Yes. Even if site was secure from public, information is not secure to other users.
What are the profile security features? Answer: Limited but a user can choose who the profile information is available to (only Knot users, or public, etc.)
Why do users keep their profile information beyond the wedding? Answer: The Knot extends the experience with related sites about future home and family areas.
