A recently released paper from Lauran Gelman called Privacy, Free Speech, and 'Blurry-Edged' Social Networks discusses the technological, social, and legal regimes that have created this framework, and proposes a technical solution to permit users to maintain networks with blurry edges while still appropriately protecting speech and privacy concerns.

In mid 2009, a Cambridge's research named The Privacy Jungle: On the Market for Data Protection in Social Networks was released. "The research conducted the first thorough analysis of the market for privacy practices and policies in online social networks. From an evaluation of 45 social networking sites using 260 criteria, the research found that many popular assumptions regarding privacy and social networking need to be revisited when considering the entire ecosystem instead of only a handful of well-known sites."