Unpacking Privacy Practices in SNSs: Users’ Protection Strategies to Enforce Privacy Boundaries

Abstract

With the emergence of Social Networking Sites (SNSs), privacy management has become a great area of concern. Many of the studies in this area reach contradictory findings regarding how people make and regulate their online privacy decisions; it remains unclear how privacy management is enacted and how online privacy choices are made by different populations within varying contexts. This lack of clarity around behaviours and attitudes makes creating legislation and designing new systems to protect privacy challenging. Consequently, this study set out to investigate and observe how privacy in SNSs is dynamically regulated through the usage of the social and technological strategies that users apply to build online imaginary boundaries, or barriers, around their private information. Our research highlights the dynamic privacy-management practices through which privacy and interpersonal boundaries are maintained and preserved in SNSs. Moreover, we have examined the impact of gender, age, privacy concerns and turbulence on the protection behaviour of our sample. Cultural impact was also explored through the lenses of a western and a non-western perspective, specifically the UK and the Saudi Arabian cultures. We integrate both quantitative and qualitative methods to answer our research questions, where a comprehensive view of the proposed framework was created through a concurrent mixed methods approach. In the first phase of this study, a systematic literature review was carried out to present a comprehensive review of the literature related to privacy protection strategies in order to create a framework of those strategies and to highlight where evidence may be lacking. The second phase involved interviews with experts to verify and validate the suggested framework. Twelve experts in the privacy field were involved and they approved the proposed framework and confirmed the significance of its measures. In the third phase, our framework was used as the basis for an online questionnaire to explore the popularity of those strategies. The sample size was 681 members, of which 187 represent the UK culture and 494 represent the Saudi Arabian culture. We were then able to classify users in our sample based on their usage of the different privacy strategies. The last phase of this study was aimed at justifying the findings of the online questionnaire. Follow-up interviews were developed and undertaken with 20 people from both cultures to gain a deeper understanding on why some privacy strategies in the survey have received more usage than the others. In this study, evidence was found that SNSs’ users indeed engage in a variety of protective selfpresentations’ strategies to manage their identities online. Most of our proposed strategies were used to a statically higher extent by Saudi users. We were able to classify users based on their usage of these strategies into one of three clusters. Two of these clusters displayed similar behaviours across both cultures, with either a high usage of all strategies or no usage at all. However, the second cluster uncovered some important differences between cultures where Saudi sample incorporated three distinct strategies (segment audience, self-censoring and deletion) which indicates a balance between the most used privacy strategies. On the other hand, the UK sample in this cluster combined a remarkable choice of strategies where (falsification, multiple profiles, social steganography and advanced strategic sharing) have emerged as strategies used by the second cluster in the UK sample (that we named falsifiers). The results indicate that UK users are more concerned about their privacy when compared to Saudi users. The results indicate that UK users are more concerned about their privacy when compared to Saudi users. Moreo