Privacy norms and preferences for photos posted online

R Hoyle, L Stark, Q Ismail, D Crandall… - ACM Transactions on …, 2020 - dl.acm.org
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), 2020dl.acm.org
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 …
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.
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