Unpacking the process of privacy management and self-disclosure from the perspectives of regulatory focus and privacy calculus
Introduction
Social media platforms provide an ideal venue for users to interact with one another and present themselves; however, they can also cause potential risks to users’ identifiable information, including names, contacts, private photos, etc. (Taddicken, 2014). These aspects of identifiable personal information generally consist of information privacy (Smith et al., 2011). Information privacy violation is common on social media, and most social media users are exposed to and have experienced various types of personal information abuse (Lee, 2018, Lee and Maeve, 2016, Madden, 2012). Though social media brings about diverse benefits to users’ lives, such as maintaining relationships, self-expression, or other tangible advantages (Ellison et al., 2011, Joinson and Paine, 2012, Lee and Maeve, 2016), the prevalence of privacy risks makes users concerned about the security of their private data and unwanted exposure of personal information. Nevertheless, being concerned about privacy risks may not necessarily result in corresponding behaviors, as social media users still disclose a vast amount of personal information (e.g., Debatin et al., 2009, Taddicken, 2014). This phenomenon is known as the “privacy paradox” (Barnes, 2006).
A growing body of research has examined the relationships between privacy antecedents and privacy behaviors, generating mixed and inconsistent findings (for review, see Barth and de Jong, 2017). On the one hand, for instance, previous studies support the “privacy paradox”, such that social media users do not adjust their privacy settings despite concerned with private information (Debatin et al., 2009), and some of them are even unaware of these settings (Lee and Maeve, 2016). On the other hand, other studies challenged the “privacy paradox”, proposing that social media users are not completely naïve (Young and Quan-Haase, 2013). Those who are concerned about privacy employ various strategies for protection, such as limiting friendship requests or deleting tags and photos (Chen and Chen, 2015, Lang and Barton, 2015, Son and Kim, 2008, Youn, 2009).
The mixed results could be due to that most studies focused on a limited aspects of privacy behaviors, which cannot accurately reflect the complex process of these behaviors (Kokolakis, 2017). Social media users simultaneously engage in distinct types of privacy-related behaviors with different (often competing) goals: for instance, information disclosure for the promotion of social networking and privacy preservation for the prevention of privacy loss (Petronio, 2012). In addition, they adopt a pool of diverse activities for privacy boundary regulations (Ellison et al., 2011, Lampinen et al., 2011). Previous literature ignores that a) dyadic privacy behaviors are leveraged by various antecedents (e.g., different goals and motivations), rather than the same one (e.g., privacy concerns) (Wirtz and Lwin, 2009); and b) a variety of privacy rules are adopted to prevent risks at different stages of information disclosure (Child et al., 2012, Petronio, 2012).
To address the aforementioned gaps, this study built a research model by integrating two theoretical perspectives, namely, regulatory focus theory (RFT) (Higgins, 1997) and privacy calculus (Dinev and Hart, 2006, Laufer and Wolfe, 1977). By employing the perspective of RFT, we distinguished between promotion-oriented antecedents/outcomes and prevention-oriented ones, and aligned the privacy antecedents (i.e., prior experiences of privacy violation, privacy concerns, benefits of social awareness) with behavioral outcomes (i.e., self-disclosure and privacy management strategies). By utilizing privacy calculus perspective, we examined the joint effects of privacy antecedents so as to explain how promotion-oriented (vs. prevention-oriented) privacy antecedents compete with or complement one another to determine social media users’ privacy protection strategies. Finally, previous studies suggest that online users take privacy protections before, during, and after their sharing or posting activities (e.g., Child et al., 2012). Considering the variety of privacy protected behaviors, in the proposed model, we categorized privacy management strategies via the criteria of chronology (according to the stages of disclosure). We then validated our research model using survey data collected from 525 active social media users in the US.
Section snippets
Theoretical framework
According to the communication privacy management theory, in a social interaction context, the nature of privacy protection is a dialectic and dynamic process of boundary regulation. Individuals develop privacy rules to keep the balance between privacy (close of the interpersonal boundary) and social connection (open) through dynamic interpersonal boundary management processes (Petronio, 1991, Petronio, 2012). On social media, users disclose information to present themselves for self-promotion
Data collection
Data was collected through an online survey from June to July 2016, in the US. Participants were recruited from a professional research company’s panel, containing nearly 6 million panelists. Eligible participants were invited to complete the survey through Qualtrics and were regular Facebook users (those who visit Facebook at least once in two weeks), who were older than 18 years. Quota sampling, based on age and gender, was then employed to match the proportion of selected participants to
Results
R with the statistical package lavaan (version 0.5-22) was employed for data analysis. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) were conducted to examine the measurement model, and structural equation modeling (SEM) was performed to test the research model and proposed hypotheses.
Discussion
The key purpose of this study was to attain a holistic understanding about how different privacy antecedents (prior experiences, privacy concerns, and benefits of social awareness) influence the sequential behavioral outcomes (privacy management strategies and self-disclosure) through integrating the perspectives of RFT and privacy calculus. The results show that self-disclosure is solely determined by the benefits of social awareness. In contrast, the influencers of privacy management vary
Limitations and conclusions
A few limitations should be noted in the current study. First, our findings were based on the analysis of cross-sectional survey data, which is difficult to use for establishing causal relationships. Though this is a common drawback of most survey-based studies, our arguments were established on a collection of well-developed theories and existing empirical evidence, therefore, this limitation should not detract heavily from our research claims. Second, the categorization of privacy management
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