Privacy, Patriarchy, and Participation on Social Media

Technology use in India is highly gendered across diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, and women have only recently come to widely adopt smartphones, mobile internet, and social media---even in urban India. We present an in-depth qualitative investigation of the appropriation of social computing technologies by women from urban, middle-income households in New Delhi and Bangalore, India. Our findings highlight the additional burden that these women must contend with, on account of gender, as they engage on social media. We discuss these findings to make three contributions. First, we extend conversations on gender in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) by discussing how design in patriarchal contexts might be rooted in existing efforts towards change and appropriation. Second, we expand understandings of privacy in HCI as being situated in the relationship between the individual and the collective. Third, we discuss how looking at our participants' social media use across multiple platforms leads to greater insight into the link between social media engagement and privacy.