Privacy Norms and Preferences for Photos Posted Online

Abstract

We are surrounded by digital images of personal lives posted online. Changes in information and communications technology have enabled widespread sharing of personal photos, increasing access to aspects of private life previously less observable. Most studies of privacy online explore differences in individual privacy preferences. Here we examine privacy perceptions of online photos considering both social norms, collectively-shared expectations of privacy and individual preferences. We conducted an online factorial vignette study on Amazon's Mechanical Turk (n = 279). Our findings show that people share common expectations about the privacy of online images, and these privacy norms are socially contingent and multidimensional. Use of digital technologies to share personal photos is influenced by social context as well as individual preferences, while such sharing can affect the social meaning of privacy.

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

Publication Date

8-1-2020

Publication Title

ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction

Department

Computer Science

Document Type

Article

DOI

https://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3380960

Keywords

Privacy, Image sharing, Contextual integrity, Factoral survey, Internet users, Age, Technology, Context, Models

Language

English

Format

text

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