Privacy Concerns vs. User Behavior in Community Question Answering

Abstract: Community-based question answering (CQA) platforms are crowd-sourced services for sharing user expertise on various topics, from mechanical repairs to parenting. While they naturally build-in an online social network infrastructure, they carry a very different purpose from Facebook-like social networks, where users "hang-out" with their friends and tend to share more personal information. It is unclear, thus, how the privacy concerns and their correlation with user behavior in an online social network translate into a CQA platform. This study analyzes one year of recorded traces from a mature CQA platform to understand the association between users' privacy concerns as manifested by their account settings and their activity in the platform. The results show that privacy preference is correlated with behavior in the community in terms of engagement, retention, accomplishments and deviance from the norm. We find privacy-concerned users have higher qualitative and quantitative contributions, show higher retention, report more abuses, have higher perception on answer quality and have larger social circles. However, at the same time, these users also exhibit more deviant behavior than the users with public profiles.