Exploring Ephemerality in Social Media With The Facebook Timebomb

Online social networking has become prevalent in the lives of many individuals. People share information with little acknowledgment that their personal posts remain online indefinitely. To further explore this privacy vulnerability, we conducted an interview study that exposed perceptions and behaviors surrounding the permanence of posts. We found that 14 out of 15 interviewees admitted to deleting posts made on their wall, for reasons such as removing ads, games, the misuse/misspelling of words and redundant posts. However while participants occasionally removed offending posts, many did not consider the long term consequences of what they may post and rarely removed old information. We posit that reducing the effort in removing posts will provide additional privacy protection. We have developed a prototype application on  Facebook’s platform which we named Facebook Timebomb, that enables users to post status updates and photos to Facebook with an additional option of a time when the post will automatically be deleted. This application allows users to predetermine when their posts will be deleted; serving as an effortless mechanism to control the longevity of their posts. With this prototype, we are conducting a controlled user study to examine whether users change their sharing habits and perceptions with this new deletion option and how it impacts their perceptions of the temporality of their online information. The results of these two studies provide guidance for the design of privacy-preserving features and interfaces on social media sites.