Balancing Privacy Concerns and Impression Management Strategies on Facebook

Social network sites like Facebook allow users to engage in selfpresentation through a variety of text-based, visual, and interactive features, and numerous studies have examined the various social and technical strategies Facebook users engage in to manage their online persona. That said, few studies have examined how engagement in these impression management strategies varies across users. This paper presents initial findings from a large (N=833) study including three samples to evaluate the relationship between individual factors, network composition and privacy concerns with the use of social and technical features to regulate access to personal information on Facebook. Rather than a straightforward relationship between privacy concerns and impression management, findings suggest that engagement in these strategies involves a number of contextual factors such as age, sex, and Internet efficacy. These complex relationships are discussed with a focus on implications for researchers and designers to consider when evaluating and building these systems.

[1]  Cliff Lampe,et al.  Privacy in Interaction: Exploring Disclosure and Social Capital in Facebook , 2012, ICWSM.

[2]  Adam D. I. Kramer,et al.  Self-Censorship on Facebook , 2013, ICWSM.

[3]  Wiebke Maaß,et al.  The Elderly and the Internet: How Senior Citizens Deal with Online Privacy , 2011, Privacy Online.

[4]  D. J. Lee.  Society and the Adolescent Self-Image , 1969 .

[5]  Helen Nissenbaum,et al.  Privacy in Context - Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life , 2009 .

[6]  Airi Lampinen,et al.  We're in it together: interpersonal management of disclosure in social network services , 2011, CHI.

[7]  E. Goffman.  The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life , 1959 .

[8]  E. Litt.  Knock, Knock. Who's There? The Imagined Audience , 2012 .

[9]  Ralf De Wolf,et al.  Managing privacy boundaries together: Exploring individual and group privacy management strategies in Facebook , 2014, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[10]  S. Petronio.  Boundaries of Privacy: Dialectics of Disclosure , 2002 .

[11]  Eszter Hargittai,et al.  Succinct Survey Measures of Web-Use Skills , 2012 .

[12]  Zeynep Tufekci.  Can You See Me Now? Audience and Disclosure Regulation in Online Social Network Sites , 2008 .

[13]  Alessandro Acquisti,et al.  Information revelation and privacy in online social networks , 2005, WPES '05.

[14]  Jinyoung Kim,et al.  "You can't block people offline": examining how facebook's affordances shape the disclosure process , 2014, CSCW.

[15]  Eden Litt,et al.  Understanding social network site users' privacy tool use , 2013, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[16]  Alfred Kobsa,et al.  Don't Disturb My Circles! Boundary Preservation Is at the Center of Location-Sharing Concerns , 2012, ICWSM.

[17]  Danah Boyd,et al.  I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience , 2011, New Media Soc..

[18]  Madeline E. Smith,et al.  Awkward encounters of an "other" kind: collective self-presentation and face threat on facebook , 2014, CSCW.

[19]  Sameer Patil,et al.  Balancing Audience and Privacy Tensions on Social Network Sites: Strategies of Highly Engaged Users , 2015 .

[20]  Noel A. Card,et al.  Best practices for missing data management in counseling psychology. , 2010, Journal of counseling psychology.

[21]  D. Boyd.  Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications , 2010 .

[22]  Jessica Vitak.  The Impact of Context Collapse and Privacy on Social Network Site Disclosures , 2012 .

[23]  Users and Nonusers : Interactions between Levels of Facebook Adoption and Social Capital , 2012 .

[24]  Patti M. Valkenburg,et al.  Adolescents' Online Privacy: Toward a Developmental Perspective , 2011, Privacy Online.

[25]  P. Leonardi,et al.  Social Media Use in Organizations: Exploring the Affordances of Visibility, Editability, Persistence, and Association , 2013 .

[26]  Mike Thelwall,et al.  Privacy and Gender in the Social Web , 2011, Privacy Online.

[27]  Lorrie Faith Cranor,et al.  The post that wasn't: exploring self-censorship on facebook , 2013, CSCW.

[28]  Alessandro Acquisti,et al.  Imagined Communities: Awareness, Information Sharing, and Privacy on the Facebook , 2006, Privacy Enhancing Technologies.

[29]  Robert G. Capra,et al.  Factors mediating disclosure in social network sites , 2011, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[30]  B. Hogan.  The Presentation of Self in the Age of Social Media: Distinguishing Performances and Exhibitions Online , 2010 .

[31]  Michael S. Bernstein,et al.  Quantifying the invisible audience in social networks , 2013, CHI.