Privacy and Social Media Ecologies Lorraine G. Kisselburgh Brian Lamb School of Communication Purdue University 100 N. University Street West Lafayette, IN 47907 USA [email protected]

Abstract Research indicates privacy needs of individuals in social media environments vary by the context of interaction, as well as age and gender, and individuals use social media affordances to support privacy goals and reduce overlap in relational circles. We examine the relationship between affordances, disclosures, and cultural background, using an ecological perspective to understand how social media affordances can facilitate interactional privacy behaviors. We posit that space and the affordances of social media play a key role in an ecological understanding of online social interaction. Designing social media spaces that allow individuals to perceive, experience, and engage with affordances to regulate and control their social interaction and behaviors enhances the goals of social media by facilitating interaction, participation, as well as cooperative work. Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). CSCW’12, February 11–15, 2012, Seattle, Washington, USA. ACM 978-1-4503-1051-2/12/02.

Author Keywords Privacy; social media; ecological; affordances; disclosures

Introduction Altman [1] has noted that individuals engage in social worlds and are constantly faced with the need to balance needs for privacy with the realities of a social world. While many attempt to characterize the growing privacy concerns of internet users as antithetical to 21st century social media environments, much of our research reflects the awareness that social media have become mainstream interactive spaces that are used by many, in spite of consistently high concerns about privacy. For example, half of all adults today (and 65% of those online) use social networking technologies, some daily, including 47% of online adults 50-64 and 26% of online adults 65 and older [13]. Recent statistics on social media use indicate 800 million Facebook users, 250 million Twitter users sending over 200 million tweets per day, and over 3 billion YouTube videos viewed per day. In addition to widespread use of social media by individuals throughout the world, social media are now widely and globally adopted for organizational use. In a study of 1055 executives in 17 countries in 2010, we found that three out of four organizations have adopted social media for business use [12], but that adoption of specific tools and their usage by employees continues

to vary depending upon the tool, and is tightly controlled in certain settings. Concerns about privacy and security risks to organizations remain an underlying concern, which stands in paradox to acknowledged business value and revenue potential.

Background In previous research [8], we have demonstrated that individuals construct the meaning of privacy in various ways that are often framed as dialectic tensions of control, relationality, and materiality, but that are contextual and situated culturally. This research provides empirical grounding to understanding emerging meanings of privacy in 21st century contexts that acknowledges the shifting behavioral norms of interaction in sociotechnical spaces, and also recognizes the challenges faced in constructing privacy meanings in non-physical realms. Individuals continue to define privacy in very material ways, including the spaces and architectural boundaries that define public and private realms. This can create difficulties in constructing privacy meanings in non-material worlds.

Figure 1: Concept map illustrating the thematic clustering of privacy concepts comparing male and female participants.

We have also found that while individual meanings of privacy vary widely and are dynamically shaped by one’s context, there are shared meanings common to particular groups [11,15]. Females are more likely to conceptualize relational meanings of privacy, compared to the material meanings more typically articulated by males (see Figure 1); similarly, younger college adults are more likely to conceptualize relational meanings of privacy, compared to the material meanings more typically articulated by older college adults. This tells us that meanings of privacy, and possibly associated disclosure and sharing behaviors, are contextualized by one’s gender and age.

In addition to the discursive meanings of privacy, our research has provided empirical evidence that individuals in social networking sites engage in active management of social group boundaries [9]. Our research on college adults demonstrates that the structure of friendship relations in social networking sites indicates privacy influences how social networks are sized and clustered, reflecting a compartmentalization strategy that individuals enact in the construction and maintenance of social friendships (see Figure 2). Individuals with strong privacy concerns are more likely to keep their groups of friends separate (i.e., prevent overlap of social circles), thus reducing sharing across relational boundaries (e.g. personal, professional, family, school friends, etc.). This reflects an active management of social group boundaries among individuals with privacy concerns. Finally, in research with a large (N=1322) sample of adults we found that manipulating the information provided about social networking audiences (e.g., those with whom one would interact and share information) influences the degree to which individuals are willing to disclose [2,10]. That is, because it is difficult to imagine communities online, providing visual contextual cues about the audience to whom one is disclosing information influences disclosure: novice users of SNS are more likely to restrict the information they disclose when they can see the scope of their audience. This indicates that designing social media affordances that provide clearer information about audiences and the architectural boundaries of interactive space, such as “virtual walls” [7] can facilitate interactional privacy activity and therefore facilitate the positive benefits of social interaction while providing the control and regulation that some users seek.

Figure 2. Representation of typical social network structure of college student, based upon average network measures, with degree centrality emphasized.

In summary, our research suggests that the privacy needs of individuals in social media environments vary by the context of interaction, as well as age and gender of participants, and that individuals make use of social media affordances (such as privacy settings) in order to support their privacy goals and reduce overlap between relational circles. Furthermore, our research indicates that individuals may perceive and use affordances of social media environments to facilitate their sharing goals. We believe that affordances may also influence – both positively and negatively – the privacy concerns of individuals. Accordingly, we posit that environmental affordances in social media can be used to enhance privacy regulation in ways that facilitate interaction goals, and also enhance cooperative and relational goals in work environments.

affordances of social media matter, and play a key role in an ecological understanding of social interaction in online spaces. Gibson [5] introduced the concept of affordances to explain the features of a physical environment that are made available to inhabitants, that both constrain and enable certain behaviors, and are appropriated for different uses [6], depending upon the attributes of the user, the sociotechnical environment, and one’s experience engaging in that environment. Affordances are inherently dynamic [3] because interaction with the environment alters one’s perception and ability to extract affordances. Social affordances are specific in encouraging or impeding social interaction [4], and are influenced by the meanings that are derived from specific affordances; meanings that are both socially constructed and historically and culturally situated.

Current Research Building on this acknowledgement that contextual affordances influence privacy and disclosure behaviors, we are currently conducting research that aims to assess the relationship between affordances, disclosure behaviors, and cultural backgrounds of individuals [16]. We will survey social network users in two countries (China and the U.S.) to determine how system affordances of different social networking sites mediate the privacy concerns and disclosures of users. In this workshop, I will discuss this research and also discuss developing models for contextual influences on privacy behaviors that are grounded in ecological perspectives. An ecological perspective [5] provides a foundation to understand how the affordances of social media contextual environments can be utilized in ways to facilitate interactional privacy behaviors that enhance cooperative behaviors. We posit that space and the

As Altman’s privacy regulation theory [1] posits, individuals draw upon the contextual environment in a dynamic process of regulating the extent of one’s social interaction, using various spatial techniques (e.g., adjusting personal space and territories). In cooperative work contexts, privacy regulation has importance at both individual as well as organizational levels. Individually, privacy regulation allows individuals to manage relational boundaries through communicative and discursive practices [14] to facilitate trust development among cooperative groups, as well as social bonding. This may include managing boundaries between personal and professional identities when using social media technologies. At the organizational level, our research [12] reveals that global concerns about data exfiltration, essentially an organizational privacy concern, are a significant factor in restricting employee use of social media in the

workplace. However, these concerns vary based upon the affordances of social media—collaborative tools with clearer relationships to organizational work practices are more readily adopted and supported than the more social tools such as social networking sites and streaming media.

Implications Designing social media spaces that allow individuals to perceive, experience, and engage with affordances to regulate and control their social interaction and behaviors ultimately enhances the goals of social media by facilitating interaction, conversation, and participation, as well as cooperative work. There are specific design implications suggested by this research: 1. 2.

3.

Design interactive environments that can facilitate differential relational and disclosure goals, based upon gender, age, and levels of privacy concern; Design interactive environments that can facilitate the multiplicity of relational types – family, friends, colleagues, and workgroups – allowing individuals to engage with social media while allowing them to take advantage of connect and sharing features without the concerns of transparency, surveillance, and relational boundary violations; and Design affordances that recognize the unique contextual changes created by mobile technologies.

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