Spark

Your Facebook posts aren't as private as you think

You think they are, but they aren't.
Even the most conscientious social media users tend to share posts with a bigger audience than initially intended. (Pexels under CC0)

Think you know who sees your Facebook posts? Jennifer Suh, a researcher at UC Santa Barbara, wanted to see how much people's perception of privacy on Facebook changes with the type of device they use to share information.

When Jennifer compared the intended privacy settings with the actual visibility of the post, she found that people were pretty bad at keeping their information secure. People seemed to consistently share information with a bigger audience than intended, and on desktop computers, people miscalculated the privacy of their posts, compared to when they shared things on their mobile devices.