Privacy Concerns and Self-Disclosure in Private and Public Uses of Social Media

Abstract

The study contributes to the ongoing debate about the "privacy paradox" in the context of using social media. The presence of a privacy paradox is often declared if there is no relationship between users' information privacy concerns and their online self-disclosure. However, prior research has produced conflicting results. The novel contribution of this study is that we consider public and private self-disclosure separately. The data came from a cross-national survey of 1,500 Canadians. For the purposes of the study, we only examined the subset of 545 people who had at least one public account and one private account. Going beyond a single view of self-disclosure, we captured five dimensions of self-disclosure: Amount, Depth, Polarity, Accuracy, and Intent; and two aspects of privacy concerns: concerns about organizational and social threats. To examine the collected data, we used Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling. Our research does not support the presence of a privacy paradox as we found a relationship between privacy concerns from organizational and social threats and most of the dimensions of self-disclosure (even if the relationship was weak). There was no difference between patterns of self-disclosure on private versus public accounts. Different privacy concerns may trigger different privacy protection responses and, thus, may interact with self-disclosure differently. Concerns about organizational threats increase awareness and accuracy while reducing amount and depth, while concerns about social threats reduce accuracy and awareness while increasing amount and depth.

Online Adolescent's Self-Disclosure as Social Media Users: The Role of Extraversion Personality, Perception of Privacy Risk, Convenience of Relationship Maintenance, and Self-Presentation

“…Several studies suggest that individuals with high online selfdisclosure tend to have a more positive perception about the possibility of having less privacy (Utz, 2015;Yu, Li, He, Wang, & Jiao, 2020). The result above supports previous studies suggesting that loss of privacy is a consequence of sharing the personal information in social media or self-disclosure (Gruzd & Hernandez-Garcia, 2018;Moll, Pieschl, & Bromme, 2014). The study of Ji, Wang, Zhang, and Zhu (2014) states that although many adolescents are concerned about privacy issues on social media, many still perceive that privacy is not a potential threat to the internet user.…”

Cybervetting and the Public Life of Social Media Data

“…CFSMIP measures an individual’s concerns for information privacy in response to an organization’s use or potential use of their personal information across the following four dimensions: collection (COL), errors (ERR), secondary use (SUS), and unauthorized access (UAC). Even though there are a number of alternative approaches to measure privacy concerns on social media (e.g., Dinev et al, 2013; Krasnova et al, 2009; Malhotra et al, 2004), we chose to use CFIP, and specifically its social media version—CFSMIP—because of its emphasis on the organizational use of data which fits well with the focus of this research on employers’ use (as opposed to personal use) of social media data (Gruzd & Hernández-García, 2018). The CFSMIP-related questions were general in nature and were not limited to the hiring context (see Table 1).…”

Sexting during social isolation: Predicting sexting-related privacy management during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…Privacy protection behaviors are foremost predicted by online privacy concerns (H. Chen et al, 2017;H.-T. Chen & W. Chen, 2015;De Wolf, 2020;Gruzd & Hernández-García, 2018;Mamonov & Benbunan-Fich, 2018). Lutz and Ranzini (2017) differentiated online privacy concerns into institutional (i.e., concerns about the trustworthiness of the platform or app) and social (i.e., concerns about the trustworthiness of the communication partner) privacy concerns.…”