Information Hunting

Description
Information Hunting is a behaviour pattern that stems from privacy settings being exploitable. It is the art of finding information that is supposedly hidden from the user, but accessible by going through other users or features, that make the information accessible. Information Hunting is often called stalking.

Examples
Alice wants to look at photos which are tagged with Bob, i.e, photos of Bob. Bob has however blocked access to his photos for none-friends, and as Alice and Bob are not friends, Alice can not see pictures of Bob. Instead, Alice finds Cheryl, who is a good friend of Bob. As Cheryl has not blocked access to her photos, Alice goes through all of them, in hope of finding pictures of both bob and Cheryl, accomplishing her goal.

Alice can still look at pictures of Bob, although Bob believes there is no way a none-friend can look at photos of him, as he has set the privacy settings to not allow such actions.

Pros & Cons
Depending on the context the possibility to access "hidden" information, or stalking, can be both a pro and a con.

+It could be a pro if it helps someone solve a crime by them accessing information that the suspect thought wasn't accessable.

-It gives the user a false insentive that they have control over who can see their content.

Relations
This pattern stems from the mechanic that everyone that "owns" some content can control amongst their friends who can view it. It's also closley coupled with to the pattern Percieved Audience since a user might think that the persons that can view her content is subset A however subset B can also view her content that is shared with her friend since her friend has friends in subset B.

Information Hunting is also closely coupled to Friend Surfing, since one activity can turn into the other.

The mechanic needed to avoid this behavior would be to clearly state for the user when they handle their content who will be able to see it.

Contributors
Created by Christian Broniewicz, from interviews. Revised by Magnus Spånggård