Incidental Data: A Survey towards Awareness on Privacy-Compromising Data Incidentally Shared on Social Media

Abstract

Sharing information with the public is becoming easier than ever before through the usage of the numerous social media platforms readily available today. Once posted online and released to the public, information is almost impossible to withdraw or delete. More alarmingly, postings may carry sensitive information far beyond what was intended to be released, so-called incidental data, which raises various additional security and privacy concerns. To improve our understanding of the awareness of incidental data, we conducted a survey where we asked 192 students for their opinions on publishing selected postings on social media. We found that up to 21.88% of all participants would publish a posting that contained incidental data that two-thirds of them found privacy-compromising. Our results show that continued efforts are needed to increase our awareness of incidental data posted on social media.