Achievement

ESP IGERT Fellow Federica Forniciari's research on privacy in user reviews on Amazon.com website was an interdisciplinary project that was supervised by faculty from diverse disciplines. Her paper entitled “Amazon is my hangout! Self-disclosure and community building in Amazon’s reviews” is a study of the patterns of self-disclosure by people who provide Amazon reviews. Federica attempted to measure the level of sensitive information that users revealed by using the software Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC). She collected 3,485 reviews for six different products on Amazon and found that people reveal sensitive information in the categories of family, humans, affect, positive emotions, negative emotions, sadness, cognitive mechanisms, concerns related work achievements, leisure and money.