Social media and social network sites (SNS) need to
preserve users’ privacy, in order to achieve full acceptance and to succeed in
the application markets. Thus, SNS developers need to understand and take into
account users’ privacy concerns as early as possible in the development. It is
difficult, however, to foresee how the system fulfills users’ privacy expectations
until the system is in actual use. Different user-centered techniques applied
during the development can offer insights for developers into users’ privacy
expectations and concerns. In this paper, we empirically show what kinds of
privacy concerns users spontaneously brought forth in a formative usability
test of a social networking site and how these were attributable to different
features of the application and related coping mechanisms. The identified manifestations
of privacy concerns help SNS designers and evaluators to pay attention early to
privacy issues as a natural part of user centered development.