Evolution of Publicly Disclosed Information in Facebook Profiles

With more than one billion subscribers, Facebook contains a huge amount of personal and sensitive information from its users. This personal information may be accessible to external entities/users based on users' privacy configuration and/or due to external changes such as releasing of new policies or configuration by Facebook. This study aims to understand both how the amount of available public information is evolving on the largest social network, Facebook, and the effect of the new Facebook profile layout appearance, "Timeline", on this evolution? To this end, we analyzed the evolution of disclosed information on 73K Facebook users' profiles for a period of 5 months. We study both the overall evolution as well as user-based evolution, and the results show how the amount of available information changed on the 5 months period ofour study.