Privacy-awareness information for web forums

While interacting with others on the internet, users share a lot of personal data with a potentially large but "invisible" audience. An important issue is maintaining control over personal data and therefore, in the first place, users need to be aware to whom they are disclosing which data. Based on the cues-filtered-out theory we introduce a new feature to support the privacy-awareness of forum users and tested it with 313 users. The results of our empirical study show that the presentation of privacy-related context cues indeed increases forum users' privacy-awareness. This is an important precondition for users' willingness to modify privacy settings or to use privacy-enhancing technologies.