Influencing Photo Sharing Decisions on Social Media: A Case of Paradoxical Findings

Abstract

We investigate the effects of perspective taking, privacy cues, and portrayal of photo subjects (i.e., photo valence) on decisions to share photos of people via social media. In an online experiment we queried 379 participants about 98 photos (that were previously rated for photo valence) in three conditions:(1) Baseline: participants judged their likelihood of sharing each photo; (2) Perspective-taking: participants judged their likelihood of sharing each photo when cued to imagine they are the person in the photo; and (3) Privacy: participants judged their likelihood to share after being cued to consider the privacy of the person in the photo. While participants across conditions indicated a lower likelihood of sharing photos that portrayed people negatively, they -surprisingly -reported a higher likelihood of sharing photos when primed to consider the privacy of the person in the photo. Frequent photo sharers on real-world social media platforms and people without strong personal privacy preferences were especially likely to want to share photos in the experiment, regardless of how the photo portrayed the subject. A follow-up study with 100 participants explaining their responses revealed that the Privacy condition led to a lack of concern with others' privacy. These findings suggest that developing interventions for reducing photo sharing and protecting the privacy of others is a multivariate problem in which seemingly obvious solutions can sometimes go awry.Index Terms-privacy, decision-making, perspective-taking, intervention, photo meme 1 Merriam-Webster defines a 'meme' as "an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture.

“I thought you were okay”: Participatory Design with Young Adults to Fight Multiparty Privacy Conflicts in Online Social Networks

“…Research on the third family of solutions is limited to a few studies [6,7,21,81]. Cherubini et al [21] developed dissuasive mechanisms to deter MPC infringers.…”

“…5 The mean age of the participants was 23.3 (SD=5.9) ranging from 19 to 41. All MPC subjects were students (9 bachelor students and 3 master's students 6 ), except for one female participant (41 years old) who was a brand manager working in a private company. The other MPC subjects belonged to different faculties such as engineering (4P, or 30.8%), social and political sciences (2P, 15.4%), computer and communication sciences (1P, 7.7%), geosciences and environment (1P, 7.7%), basic sciences (1P, 7.7%), business and economics (1P, 7.7%), biology and medicine (1P, 7.7%), and law and criminal sciences (1P, 7.7%).…”

“…Several solutions prompt the MPC infringer with dissuasive warnings. These have been researched in previous privacy research [6,21,81]. Using a different approach, two of the solutions designed by our participants suggest using consent collection from all parties appearing in the content as a precondition to publishing it.…”

“…The second stream includes studies that propose privacy-preserving solutions for OSNs. They provide either technical solutions [52,55,95,115] or dissuasive strategies stemming from persuasion theories [6,7,21,81]. These studies do not, however, place users at the heart of the design process, instead they propose solutions that do not necessarily consider users' real-life MPC experiences, attitudes, and behaviors in OSNs.…”

“…Even though we included a 'non-binary' option in the gender question (cf. Q1 of the screener, supplementary material A), no participant selected it 6. For brevity in the remainder of the article, we refer to the number of participant with the capital 'P'.…”