Applying contextual integrity to the context of social networking sites tracking

Behavioural tracking is very common and many studies have shown that a user's online movements can be tracked by various parties including advertisers and data aggregators. The findings of our experiments showed that social network sites (SNS), particularly Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Plus, have the ability to not only collect and store large volume of a use's information, but also transfer user's data to third party sites and also track that user's movement within and beyond SNS boundary, particularly among web sites embedding SNS widgets. In this paper, we analysed the privacy issue of online user's tracking by SNS from the perspective of Helen Nissenbaum's Contextual Integrity. Our aim was to answer to the question of whether or not an online user's privacy is violated by such a practice.