Unpacking Privacy Practices in SNSs: Users’ Protection Strategies to Enforce Privacy Boundaries

Abstract

With the emergence of Social Networking Sites (SNSs), privacy management has been a great area of concern for SNSs’ population. Moreover, most of the studies reach contradictory findings regarding how people regulate their online privacy. This lack of clarity around behaviours and attitudes makes creating legislation and designing new systems to protect privacy challenging. Communication Privacy Management theory (developed in the context of fact-to-face interactions) suggests that when communicating people manage a complex set of imaginary boundaries, and use a variety of strategies to enforce them. In this paper, we explore to what extent this has been observed in online behaviour. Consequently, this paper presents a broad review of the literature published between 2003-2017 relating to privacy protection strategies. This reveals 10 distinct strategies: 5 technological and 5 social. It also reveals a strong bias towards Facebook, and a majority American or European context. Our findings suggest that previous work may have overlooked some of the strategies, even in the technological category, and that may explain the behavioural discrepancies observed. It also indicates that more needs to be done to understand privacy behaviour on a wider set of platforms, and with a broader cultural context