Privacy Customization in a Social Sharing Tool: Where Academic Publications Meet Social Platforms

Abstract

Encyclia is a software tool to make ORCID records available on open social media platforms through the ActivityPub protocol. Through it, academic bibliographic information can gain additional visibility and interaction in the form of social posts, which raises new safety and privacy concerns. Advanced privacy settings on the Encyclia platform enable the personalization of information access and sharing. This paper discusses these privacy settings and systems as a case study for applying established personalization classifications from the academic literature. It differentiates implicit and explicit personalization via active user involvement and the dynamic role of the system itself in its purpose of bridging data across platforms.

CCS Concepts

• Security and privacy → Privacy protections; ocial aspects of security and privacy; • Information systems → Personalization; • Human-centered computing → Social network analysis.

Keywords

privacy settings, social media, ORCID, personalization, adaptivity, adaptability

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Mensch und Computer 2025 – Workshopband, Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V., 31. August - 03. September 2025, Chemnitz, Germany
© 2025 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to GI. https://doi.org/10.18420/muc2025-mci-ws04-301

1. Introduction

ORCID1 is a data platform where academics can set up a personal record to collect bibliographic metadata about their publications.

The Fediverse is a loosely defined network of interoperable social media platforms including Mastodon2, Pixelfed, Misskey, and others. Fediverse servers allow users to follow one another to read and share content across servers by using the ActivityPub protocol [3].

We are in the process of developing a data bridge tool named Encyclia3 that accesses ORCID publication data through the platform’s open API and republishes it as ActivityPub data. This allows people on Fediverse platforms to follow individual ORCID records, receive new publications in their social feeds, and share them with their followers. As a source of open bibliographic metadata, ORCID (in contrast to closed academic platforms) is ideal for this purpose.

Bridging ORCID records onto social media platforms represents an interesting opportunity for personalization of the user’s social feed. However, from the perspective of an ORCID record owner it also puts privacy concerns into focus, establishing a need for users to remain in control of what happens to their ORCID record through safety and privacy customization.

For the purpose of this paper, we treat Encyclia as a case study for real-world privacy customization on the borderline between two very different informational environments: ORCID and the Fediverse. This article provides an overview of the privacy issues that arise and the resulting design considerations for Encyclia’s privacy and safety customization.

1https://orcid.org

2https://joinmastodon.org

3https://encyclia.pub

2. Privacy Settings on ORCID

ORCID record owners can use the ORCID website to make changes to the content or presentation of their record. This includes customization of which parts of the record are to be public or not public. In the ORCID context, “public” carries a specific meaning which is detailed in ORCID’s terms of use4, privacy policy5, and privacy settings documentation6. Notably, public ORCID data is considered copyright-free and can be reused in other public and non-public contexts without specific permission or notice. This is a result of ORCID’s purpose as a data repository for bibliographic metadata: to make its public data easily accessible and reusable by external systems and avoid duplicated data entry.

Most academics are eager to have their works widely shared and cited, as academic community reception is a major factor in career advancement. This group is well-served by ORCID’s default privacy settings, which show metadata for all works publicly.

Some academics are indifferent about visibility, and some may even prefer to stay somewhat under the radar and keep a degree of close control over the visibility of their works [5], perhaps because they work in a field subject to political persecution or they are dealing with other sources of personal harassment. If they need to have an ORCID record (which is now mandatory for publishing in some venues), they may choose to adjust the privacy settings for all publications, including future ones, to be non-public. At the extreme end, an ORCID record can be “locked down” such that only the person’s name and ID number remain publicly visible.

4https://info.orcid.org/terms-of-use/

5https://info.orcid.org/privacy-policy/

6https://support.orcid.org/hc/en-us/articles/25538671642519

3. Privacy and Safety Concerns on the Fediverse

By making public ORCID data available via ActivityPub, we are simultaneously incorporating it into a new context with differing technical and social norms around data handling and introducing novel interaction modalities that ORCID does not provide on its own. The former is discussed in some depth in Fietkau [2] and will not be repeated here for the sake of brevity. This text will instead elaborate on the latter.

ORCID is intentionally designed not to be a social platform. Record owners cannot interact with one another on the ORCID platform; there are no facilities for sharing, commenting, or following. By bridging ORCID records into the Fediverse, Encyclia (a) makes ORCID record owners followable, (b) makes individual publications shareable, and (c) makes them open to comments and reactions, such as “likes”. Each of these modalities needs to be considered from a privacy and safety perspective.

If an ORCID record is bridged through Encyclia and subsequently a new publication gets added to it, that record’s followers can see it in their social feeds and may even receive a notification. This is not possible on the ORCID website – if one wants to learn whether an ORCID record has changed, the only way is to navigate to it manually and look. (ORCID does offer update notifications via its API, but this feature is exclusive to the highest membership tier reserved for academic institutions and their integrated systems. It is clearly not intended for individual users.) Even though in a technical sense Encyclia exposes no new information compared to the publicly visible ORCID record itself, the added modality of following and receiving update notifications may pose safety challenges related to, for example, stalking – an individual harasser that may have lost interest in checking an ORCID record for updates could instead be reminded by automated notifications.

Having individual academic publications be more easily shareable on social platforms is something that academics would likely broadly welcome, but that also poses privacy and safety questions. For example, on follow-driven social platforms where people with similar interests and values tend to follow one another, individual pieces of content can slip into “bubbles” of hostile or malicious users who may then proceed to attempt to cause harm to the author. Some social platforms give content authors control over who can see and share their posts, which can be used as a preemptive safety and privacy measure, and specific malicious actors can be blocked from interacting with someone’s posts.

Lastly, social platforms often allow users to write replies or comments on specific posts, of which the original author may be notified. These can stimulate discussion and help establish new professional or personal connections, but they can also be a vector for abuse, such as cyberbullying.

With all of these new interaction modalities that Encyclia would introduce to ORCID record owners, its design cannot solely rely on the privacy customization offered by ORCID. Instead, it must provide privacy and safety customization options that take these additional concerns into account.

4. Privacy Settings on Encyclia

As established above, bridging public ORCID record data into social platforms introduces new interaction modalities which require safety and privacy personalization functions that ORCID itself cannot provide. For that reason, Encyclia has its own privacy customization interface, granting users access to additional customization.

To begin with, we note that the possibility of replies/comments from social platforms is a considerable safety concern that takes sig- nificant time and effort to moderate effectively. Encyclia preempts this danger by simply not facilitating replies or comments. Any text comments that arrive at Encyclia from other ActivityPub servers are quietly ignored and never displayed to ORCID record owners. Through this blanket decision, Encyclia renders replies/comments moot as a potential attack vector.

After authenticating as an ORCID record owner on the Encyclia website, the platform’s account privacy personalization options become available, a portion of which is shown in Figure 2. These include:

Account display customization: ORCID record owners can individually decide which descriptive parts of their record (biography, keywords, web links, email addresses, other identifiers) should be visible through Encyclia. Each one can be toggled on or off.

Server-based access restrictions: By default, ORCID records can be accessed via Encyclia from any ActivityPub server. If a record owner prefers to make their account inaccessible to specific servers (“block list” mode) or to restrict access exclusively to a specific list of servers (“allow list” mode), this is possible using the corresponding privacy settings.

Full opt-out: If an ORCID record owner would like to prevent their record from being bridged through Encyclia at all, a general opt-out setting is available that can be used without specific Activi- tyPub expertise.

Account deletion: For reasons of data protection, an ORCID record owner may elect to fully delete their bridged Encyclia account. In contrast to the opt-out toggle, this action is permanent.

5. Personalization Classification

Encyclia provides an interesting use case to observe and apply personalization classifications. The previously described characteristics of the application and its privacy settings are being mapped to the adaptivity and adaptability degree defined by Oppermann et al. [4] in addition to the classification scheme by Fan and Poole [1], which distinguishes explicit and implicit, individual and categorical personalization such as four design paradigms: architectural, instrumental, relational, and commercial. To determine which aspects of Encyclia align with these classifications, both authors collaboratively derived suitable assignments. One researcher proposed an initial classification and documented the rationale based on system behavior and examples. The second researcher, who contributed domain-specific knowledge of Encyclia and its differentiation from ORCID, critically reviewed these assignments and provided refinements. Discrepancies and out-of-scope classifications, not referring to privacy settings, were discussed until consensus was reached.

The first perspective concerning personalization focuses on the user involvement and degree of adaptivity when transferring publications from ORCID through Encyclia and making them available on social media. Categorizing system design and customization possibilities in the spectrum of adaptation by Oppermann et al. [4] provides an interesting approach to view the solution from a per- sonalization perspective. Mapping the previously described privacy settings to the adaptation spectrum [4], we can distinguish two extremes realized by Encyclia:

• Adaptive – no user control: The functionality of Encyclia is enabled by default and makes ORCID records available via ActivityPub without the user’s interaction. Interestingly, the users do not need to be specifically registered with Encyclia, which enables it to perform its service without any user intervention and control, even performing the data transla- tion without their knowledge (as ORCID users have given permission by agreeing to the ORCID terms of use).
• User-initiated adaptability, no system initiation: To counter potential harm social media can cause by including OR- CID records in users’ feeds, Encyclia provides user-initiated adaptability to their privacy settings, managing the trans- fer of their data to ActivityPub. This includes: display cus- tomization, block list / allow list settings, full opt-out, and permanent account deletion.

For further details, the second personalization perspective classifies the different privacy settings and features into the classification scheme and design paradigms of Fan and Poole [1] for personalization systems. Before summarizing the result and discussing design paradigms, the three questions for classification [1] are discussed:

What is personalized? The objective of the personalization is to focus on the privacy settings of ORCID users concerning the transfer of their data via ActivityPub by Encyclia. This type of personalization objective focuses on the information access to the ORCID records displayed on ActivityPub.

To whom to personalize? The personalization via privacy settings focuses on individual ORCID records, and by default, Encyclia uses categorical personalization to decide on the degree of personalization based on the privacy settings of ORCID records. For example, in case an ORCID account is mainly private, the publications of this account are also not forwarded to the Fediverse by Encyclia. All public information is assumed to be intended as open and forwarded by Encyclia as default functionality without additional restriction.

Who does the personalization? In this respect, the default settings are the implicit personalization enabled by Encyclia without user interactions, as discussed with the adaptation spectrum of Oppermann et al. [4]. However, the personalization transforms into explicit personalization through user customization by Encyclia’s optional privacy settings. This enables users to retain control over their ORCID records and how they are used in social media platforms by restricting data transfer or access.

Figure 1 displays the interplay between (a) Encyclia as an adaptive system with automated personalization using implicit categorical preferences from original ORCID records for information access to (b) Encyclia as an individually personalized transfer service through explicit user customization of privacy settings for information access, in addition to previous ORCID settings. This default use of ORCID privacy settings enables seamless personalization that aligns with users’ original sharing intentions, offering a meaningful baseline before any further customization.

Additionally, to these classifications of user involvement and personalization degrees, the design paradigms of Fan and Poole [1] provide an additional perspective on the privacy settings of Encyclia. While commercial and architectural paradigms are not the focus of such settings, the personalization is more strongly related to instrumental and relational aspects.

Instrumental personalization. The provided privacy settings enable additional functionalities that support the user’s preferences concerning the transfer and access to their ORCID records.

Relational personalization. Transferring ORCID records to social media platforms through ActivityPub fosters social exchange and increases visibility of the person’s work. Encyclia’s additional privacy settings enable users to customize their individual needs for socialization and sense of belonging, which may differ from the default setting by restricting access to their information.

In this discussion of personalization classifications for the case study of Encyclia, we observe a pattern of dynamic transformation between personalization degrees, where the system transitions between modes, such as implicit to explicit and categorical to individual personalization, depending on user interaction and involvement. This illustrates how privacy settings in such systems are not fixed, but can shift responsively according to user preferences. Increasing user customization thus becomes a vital aspect of future development to handle privacy concerns in systems that republish open data. Encyclia exemplifies a novel case of dynamic transformation in privacy settings. While existing classification theories typically handle personalization types as static categories, our analysis em- phasizes the importance of supporting fluid transitions, particularly as data practices and data portability rights grow in prominence, while users’ privacy needs remain diverse and context-dependent. Enabling user customization can address the nuanced trade-offs between visibility and privacy.

6. Outlook and Conclusion

In this paper, we have investigated personalization classifications and how they relate to the use case of Encyclia and its implementation of privacy settings concerning the transfer of ORCID records via ActivityPub, making such records available on the Fediverse. With the sharing of bibliographic data to these platforms, additional social features such as comments and likes become available that extend the previous intentions of ORCID, and consequently, they require additional privacy features to enable authors to control their records more precisely. With this functionality, Encyclia moves beyond implicit personalization via categorical privacy settings taken over from ORCID settings to a system that enables users’ adaptability with explicit personalization through individuated privacy settings. In the future, the system may incorporate additional features for certain settings to enhance the decision-making process by, e.g., recommended allow-lists for servers or auto-completing functions in text fields, leading to more differentiated interaction beyond the extreme ends of the adaptive/adaptable spectrum.

References