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United States with an English-only interface, but Portuguese-speaking
Brazilians quickly became the dominant user group (Kopytoff, 2004). Some
sites are designed with specific ethnic, religious, sexual orientation,
political, or other identity-driven categories in mind. There are even SNSs

for dogs (Dogster) and cats (Catster), although their owners must manage
their profiles.
While SNSs are often designed to be widely accessible, many attract

homogeneous populations initially, so it is not uncommon to find groups
using sites to segregate themselves by nationality, age, educational level, or
other factors that typically segment society (Hargittai, this issue), even if
that was not the intention of the designers.

Popular press coverage of SNSs has emphasized potential privacy
concerns, primarily concerning the safety of younger users (George, 2006;
Kornblum & Marklein, 2006). Researchers have investigated the potential

threats to privacy associated with SNSs. In one of the first academic studies
of privacy and SNSs, Gross and Acquisti (2005) analyzed 4,000 Carnegie
Mellon University Facebook profiles and outlined the potential threats to

privacy contained in the personal information included on the site by
students, such as the potential ability to reconstruct users' social security
numbers using information often found in profiles, such as hometown and

date of birth.
Acquisti and Gross (2006) argue that there is often a disconnect
between students' desire to protect privacy and their behaviors, a theme that
is also explored in Stutzman's (2006) survey of Facebook users and Barnes's

(2006) description of the "privacy paradox" that occurs when teens are not
aware of the public nature of the Internet. In analyzing trust on social
network sites, Dwyer, Hiltz, and Passerini (2007) argued that trust and

usage goals may affect what people are willing to share—Facebook users
expressed greater trust in Facebook than MySpace users did in MySpace
and thus were more willing to share information on the site.
In another study examining security issues and SNSs, Jagatic,

Johnson, Jakobsson, and Menczer (2007) used freely accessible profile data
from SNSs to craft a "phishing" scheme that appeared to originate from a
friend on the network; their targets were much more likely to give away

information to this "friend" than to a perceived stranger. Survey data offer a
more optimistic perspective on the issue, suggesting that teens are aware of
potential privacy threats online and that many are proactive about taking

steps to minimize certain potential risks. Pew found that 55% of online
teens have profiles, 66% of whom report that their profile is not visible to all