Comfortable with friends sharing your picture on Facebook? - Effects of closeness and ownership on picture sharing preference

Picture sharing activity on social networking sites helps create and maintain social relationships. However, some of these pictures can be undesirable digital traces especially when the person sharing the information (owner) and the person receiving the information (viewer) do not ask the sharing preference of the person who is in the picture (subject). In our exploratory lab study, we asked twenty-nine participants about their picture sharing preference (PSP) towards an owner's act of sharing a photograph containing both the participant (subject) and the owner with a viewer. Our multi-level regression on 5520 data points show that in terms of closeness, a subject feels more comfortable sharing a picture i) as the “closeness between the subject and the owner (SO closeness)” increases and ii) as the “closeness between the subject and the viewer (SV closeness)” increases. In terms of ownership, a subject feels more comfortable with sharing a picture i) when the picture shows a greater number of people as opposed to a smaller number of people, and ii) when the picture is captured at an event held for the viewer or the owner rather than for the subject. In addition, we observed three types of interaction effects on PSP between the following variables: i) SO closeness and SV closeness, ii) SO closeness and num_people, and iii) both types of closeness and event_posessor.