Tie and tag: A study of tie strength and tags for photo sharing

Tie strength and tags have been separately suggested as possible attributes for photo access controls in Social Network Services. However, an evaluation is missing about the benefits/drawbacks of adding one or both of these attributes to the ones already used in access controls for Social Network Services (groups and individuals). In this paper, we describe an experiment with 48 participants using access controls that include tie strength and tags (separately and simultaneously) together with attributes for groups and individuals. We analyze the results using several quantitative and qualitative metrics. We find that users consider these two new attributes useful in defining their sharing policies, and they prefer to employ access controls that consider tags and tie strength jointly. Specifically, users believe that tie strength improves policy understandability and that tags help them define sharing policies faster. However, we also observe that when users employ these two attributes they tend to make more mistakes in terms of the resulting sharing policy. We hypothesize that this could be caused by the lack of experience using tie strength and tags in access controls.