MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Numerous questions remain, even after Zuckerberg’s testimony, about the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Many of them underscore our continued confusion around what privacy means online. The goal of this study is to better comprehend how users conceive of digital privacy, including how they decide who will become co-owners of their digital information. Utilizing Communication Privacy Management Theory (CPM) (Petronio, 2013), we explore American adults’ perceptions of the degree of ownership they expect to have over their information online. In particular, we examine and build on a necessary bifurcation in the conception of privacy—-social privacy and institutional privacy (Raynes-Goldie, 2010).

Managing social privacy involves users deciding who in their social networks should become owners of their information. This may include family, friends, and co-workers, as well as anyone else with a Facebook account. Institutional privacy is comprised of the data collected by companies like Facebook that users have not directly input, or that have been derived using algorithms and analytic tools to create new, secondary data. This may include mouse clicks, eye movements, other websites visited on the same browser, and logins to other apps that require Facebook usernames and passwords.

Importantly, all of Facebook’s privacy settings, now called “Privacy Basics,” only allow users to manage their information sharing at the social level. There are no options to manage institutional sharing. In fact, Facebook creates “ghost” profiles of internet users who do not have Facebook profiles as a way of further collecting valuable data.

We are in the process of analyzing responses to an open-ended survey regarding conceptions of, and expectations for, privacy online. We will present results from a diverse sample of internet users, sharing in depth user perceptions as well as new ideas for studying “incidental co-ownership” online.