Social translucence mechanisms have been made available in many web 2.0 systems such as: Participation of people in online communities, in general, differ from their participatory behavior in real-world collective contexts.
[4] Zolyomi et al. proposed the principle of identity as a fourth dimension for social translucence by arguing that the design of socio-technical systems should have a rich description of who is visible, to give people control over disclosure and mechanisms to advocate for their needs.
This social-context-revealing approach has been studied in different scenarios (e.g. IBM video-conference software, large community displaying social activity traces in a shared space called NOMATIC*VIZ), and it has been demonstrated that its application can provide users with several benefits, like providing them with more information to make better decisions and motivating them to take an active attitude towards the management of their self and group representations within the display through their actions in the real-life.
[6] The feeling of personal accountability in front of others that social translucence can report to users can be used for the design of systems for supporting behavior change (e.g. weight loss, smoking cessation), if combined with the appropriate type of feedback.
One perspective is to see privacy as a tradeoff between the degree of invasion to the personal space and the number of benefits that the user could perceive from the social system by disclosing their online activity traces.