Group privacy management strategies and challenges in Facebook: A focus group study among Flemish youth organizations

Abstract

A large body of research has studied young people's privacy practices and needs in

Reframing Current Debates on Young People's Online Privacy by Taking into Account the Cultural Construction of Youth

“…To date, beliefs that young people risk becoming victims of privacy-related crimes and simultaneously threaten eroding the very notion of privacy itself due to their reckless behavior are still visible in contemporary public discourses on youth and online privacy [4].These assumptions produce a "protectionist approach" in which adults privilege themselves with imposing restrictions in order to 'protect' youths against media technologies and themselves, effectively further excluding youth from public life [1,2,41].Over the past few years, however, scholarship has countered the portrayal of young people as passive, naive, irresponsible, or irrational human beings [e.g., 3,6,24,26,27,47,48]. Rather, the dystopian technopanic narratives are a one-sided representation of a more nuanced and complex reality.…”

“…Some point towards more creative tactics that young people employ in order to control the social situation, such as posting contents of which the double-layered meaning can only be deciphered by certain intimi who have background knowledge (i.e., "social steganography") [e.g., 4,6,24]. Other research designs examine both means of control [e.g., 26,27,29,53].…”

“…As a result, adults often fail to see and understand the myriad of ways teenagers negotiate privacy in their everyday life. Over the past few years, several studies have debunked the stigmatizing myth that young people do not value privacy anymore, sometimes even suggesting that they are more capable of protecting their privacy than adults [e.g., 3,4,6,24,25,26,27].…”

Editorial: The state of online self-disclosure in an era of commodified privacy

“…Four of the six papers (De Wolf, 2016;Jia & Xu, 2016;Kezer, Sevi, Cemalcilar, & Baruh, 2016;Steijn, Schouten, & Vedder, 2016) included within this special issue take Facebook, the largest SNS, as the setting for their research. One paper (Lin, Levordashka, & Utz, 2016) focuses on users of Twitter.…”

“…The fourth article (De Wolf, 2016) presented in this special issue is a qualitative study that investigates privacy management as a group process. Twelve focus groups were held with adolescents and young adults enrolled in local youth organizations.…”