What Happens Next? Using the Story Completion Method to Surface the Affects and Materialities of Digital Privacy Dilemmas

Abstract

People’s ideas and practices concerning their personal data and digital privacy have received growing attention in social inquiry. In this article, we discuss findings from a study that adopted the story completion method together with a theoretical perspective building on feminist materialism to explore how people make sense of and respond to digital privacy dilemmas. The Digital Privacy Story Completion Project presented participants with a set of four story prompts (‘stems’) for them to complete. Each introduced a fictional character facing a privacy dilemma related to personal data generated from their online interactions or app use. Our analysis surfaces how privacy is imagined as simultaneously personal and social, redolent with affective intensities, and framed through relational connections of human and nonhuman agents. While the story stems involved scenarios using digital technologies, participants’ stories extended beyond the technological. These stories offer insight into why and how the potential for and meaning of digital privacy unfolds into more-than-digital worlds.

Keywords

affect critical data studies digital privacy digital sociology personal data sociomaterialism story completion

Introduction

In a world where a wide array of personal information is continually generated when people are online, using mobile apps or travelling through sensor-embedded environments, social inquiry has turned to investigate how people use and make sense of these data. People’s feelings, understandings and practices related to personal data privacy is a key issue in this research. Scholars in critical data studies have recently called for innovative approaches and greater consideration of the embodied and affective dimensions of public’s responses to personal data generation, processing and materialisations (Kennedy and Hill, 2018; Rudnicki, 2017). Meanwhile, a growing interest in perspectives building on feminist materialism theory is developing in sociology (Fox and Alldred, 2021; Pyyhtinen, 2016). Arts-based research creation methods for surfacing affective intensities and everyday practices are also beginning to appear in sociological scholarship (Lupton and Watson, 2021; Walling-Wefelmeyer, 2020). This interest includes the recognition of the role of storytelling for making meaning, as a way of narrating knowing, feeling and being, as a compelling form of social inquiry, and mode of representing research findings (Ayrton, 2020; Brannen, 2013; Watson and Lupton, 2021).

Building on this growing body of innovative theoretical and methodological research, our Digital Privacy Story Completion Project sought to investigate how people make sense of and respond to digital privacy dilemmas. Using the story completion method, we invited a group of Australian adults to produce written narratives about situations faced by fictional protagonists. As a research method, story completion is a generative technique for eliciting narrative data (Clarke et al., 2019). This method is a form of storytelling that involves participants writing short narratives in response to set prompts. Participants are given the opening sentences of a fictional story written by the researchers and asked to complete the story by narrating ‘what happens next’ (Braun et al., 2019). Initially developed as a projective aid for investigating individual psychodynamic responses in clinical settings (Peixotto, 1956), the method has been adopted and adapted primarily within feminist social psychology and other social constructivist approaches. In this body of literature, completed stories are analysed thematically, with researchers identifying how shared understandings, discourses, feelings, and practices are articulated in the narratives (Kitzinger and Wood, 2019).

Story completion is not often used yet in sociological research. We chose the approach because it offers a creative mode of inquiry that can encourage people to consider the implications of social problems in ways that do not involve direct questioning. It is assumed that narratives written in response to the provided story stems, while fictional, inevitably draw on story writers’ own embodied experiences and feelings as well as their acculturated understandings of the world. With our project, we aimed to use the method to build on and extend sociological and media studies work on digital privacy. We also introduce theoretical insights into feminist materialist theory to bring the affective and relational dimensions of the narratives completed by our story writers into relief.

In what follows, we begin with a discussion of previous research into people’s understandings of digital privacy, with a focus on studies designed to surface social relationships and affective responses. We then outline our conceptual approach and provide an overview of how we conducted the project. Our analysis of the completed narratives builds on concepts from feminist materialism to consider why and how digital privacy matters. We conclude by reflecting on what these narratives reveal about personal data privacy, including the more-than-digital dimensions of the story content.

Conceptualising publics’ responses to digital privacy

Data-generating digital technologies have proliferated over the last decade, collecting, archiving and processing information about people such as their consumption practices, online search habits, social media interactions, geolocation and physical activities. In researching these developments in what is often termed ‘datafication’ (van Dijck, 2014), a number of scholars have sought to map people’s understandings and concerns about data-generating technologies as they become a more commonplace presence in everyday life. Problems concerning the privacy of personal digital data are some of the core issues that have received high levels of attention across the social sciences. These issues include the leaking, hacking or breaching of the various forms of digitised personal information and its use by third parties for commercial, illicit or surveillance purposes (Aho and Duffield, 2020; Marwick, 2018; van Dijck, 2014).

A key point made in this literature on digital privacy is that the extent of datafication of people’s lives and the lack of transparency about how third parties access and use personal data are complex and therefore challenging to conceptualise. Yet, preserving digital privacy is still typically viewed as an individual responsibility (Selwyn and Pangrazio, 2018). Empirical research has shown that most people are aware of some of the potential uses of their personal digital data by third parties: particularly targeted advertising. There are a multitude of tactics that people use to protect their personal data, including crafting intimate ‘zones of privacy’ with others on social media platforms (Livingstone, 2008). However, how seemingly mundane personal data are put to use by companies or government agencies often escapes the realm of lay understanding, because practices of access and processing are often hidden from users (Bakir et al., 2015). Moving beyond what people know or can explain towards what they sense or feel is a critical shift in exploring the everyday developments and impacts of datafication (Lupton, 2017).

The affective dimensions of datafication and digital privacy have received some attention in critical data studies research. Some US-based studies of people’s understandings and practices related to the third-party use and algorithmic processing of their personal data have called attention to what has been characterised as ‘digital resignation’ (Draper and Turow, 2019) or ‘apathy’ (Hargittai and Marwick, 2016). In Draper and Turow’s (2019) research on digital resignation, most participants wanted better control over what marketers can learn about them online but had accepted that they could not achieve this. Hargittai and Marwick (2016) suggest that their participants understood the networked nature of privacy on social media: that is, that people can upload images and other information about other people to share online. However, they felt there was little they could do about these privacy threats, resulting in feelings of apathy and loss of agency.

It is important to recognise, however, that people’s responses to digital privacy are highly situated within sociocultural, economic, and political contexts. Other researchers have noted more ambivalent responses compared with those expressed in the USA in people living in high-income countries such as Australia (Selwyn and Pangrazio, 2018), Denmark (Lomborg and Kapsch, 2019), and Finland (Ruckenstein and Granroth, 2020). Rather than the affects of apathy or resignation described in US-based studies, research in these countries found that while people in these contexts were also highly aware of commercial uses of their personal data for targeted advertising or governmental uses for service provision, they tended to view these practices as offering valuable convenience. Across these studies, personal data processing was viewed as beneficial in most instances. It was when targeted advertising was considered to become too intrusive or appeared to be making inaccurate assumptions that participants in these studies responded with annoyance or frustration.

Concepts of digital privacy are also highly culturally variable. Publics living outside the Global North, for example, have expressed opinions about their personal data, which differ significantly from these privileged populations. Some publics living in the Global South are more concerned about ‘data poverty’ than digital privacy – or too little personal data being generated about them, rendering them invisible to policy makers and service providers (Milan and Treré, 2020). While variations in affect and awareness are not neatly reducible to distinctions of national context, these and other studies show how such socioeconomic and cultural factors as political and welfare systems as well as broader understandings of privacy provide an important background to the formation of publics’ digital privacy concerns (Miltgen and Peyrat-Guillard, 2014; Nissenbaum, 2020). An interest in the sociomaterialities of data drives work by Bates et al. (2016), who adopted actor-network theory to attend to the mutability, flows and ‘life of data’. Using multiple methods, including mapping and oral history interviews across a number of UK sites, they trace where and how personal data are produced, made workable, blocked, and moved. Their approach illuminates data’s networked materiality, as well as how ‘both the data and the socio-cultural values and relations that crystallise within them mutate as practitioners process data across diverse sites of practice’ (Bates et al., 2016: 9).

As a way of exploring the affective and relational dimensions as well as the materialities of personal data and digital privacy issues, we turned to conceptual scholarship which emphasises these aspects as part of the agentic capacities of human and nonhuman agents. The approach on which we draw builds on an onto-ethico-epistemological perspective articulated in feminist materialism (Barad, 2007; Haraway, 2016), which problematises and progresses how we delineate ‘the human’ as a category. This scholarship, which extends the insight of Indigenous philosophies (Hernández et al., 2020), positions humans as always ‘more-than’ discrete and autonomous beings, part of broader assemblages with nonhuman things. It sees the role of social inquiry as seeking to identify how ‘matter’ (assemblages of humans and nonhuman agents) ‘comes to matter’ (Barad, 2003). This approach challenges the idea of human autonomy and individual agency. It highlights the affective intensities and relational connections generated with and through human and nonhuman intra-actions (Barad, 2007), and the shared capacities generated across and between humans and nonhumans (Bennett, 2010; Fox and Alldred, 2021; Hernández et al., 2020).

With this theoretical approach, we seek to emphasise the materiality of digital media practices in place and space together with affective dimensions and agential capacities. Humans are seen to exist relationally with dynamic assemblages of technological devices, systems, structures, and digitised information. Focus is placed on surfacing the intra-actions and relations that occur when humans gather with digital technologies and digital data, and the forces and capacities generated with and through these encounters (Lupton and Watson, 2021).

We adopted the story completion method as a way of surfacing the more-than-digital contexts in which people make sense of privacy dilemmas. Lee’s (2019) project on the Chinese social credit system, which also used this method, found that that credit scores were considered a double-edged sword: as offering social goods to Chinese citizens and improving their social behaviour, therefore benefitting Chinese society as a whole, but also potentially infringing citizens’ privacy and posing threats to their civil rights and freedoms. The networked elements of the social credit system – that is, how individuals’ scores were directly related to and impacted by the behaviours of their friends and relatives – augmented the affective forces and relational bonds in characters’ lives, as the system in effect instituted forms of collective punishment. Like Lee, we wanted to encourage our participants to site their narratives in the broader worlds in which digital technologies are used and personal data are generated, including not only the other humans involved, but aspects of place and the nonhuman agents within these spaces (Pink and Leder Mackley, 2013). We set out to invite our participants to imagine how these data were ‘made to matter’ in their completed narratives and the materialities of the contexts they described in their stories.

The digital privacy story completion project

Story completion is gradually beginning to be incorporated into sociological inquiry, including our own previous forays into combining this method with more-than-human theory (Lupton, 2020; Watson and Lupton, 2021). We built on this experience in designing the Digital Privacy Story Completion Project. Deborah Lupton designed an approach that could move beyond directly asking people how concerned they are about such issues, as this can sometimes simply evoke obvious and well-rehearsed responses. Lupton had experimented previously with using the story completion method, inviting a different group of participants to respond to story stems about protagonists responding to a health dilemma. This experience generated rich findings that surfaced the entanglements between humans and nonhumans (technologies, places, spaces) and the role-played by affective forces and relational connections in helping people resolve their problems. The approach helped these participants imagine everyday implications in ways that provoked considerations of the affective, social, and relational dimensions of the situations to which they were creatively responding. Lupton, therefore, thought that employing the approach to a digital privacy topic could be equally as generative. Further, Lupton’s previous related research has found that people often do not feel directly affected by personal data processing and use by third parties. The Digital Privacy Story Completion project was designed to build on and extend this work. Ethics approval was provided by the university human research ethics committee.

Participant details

The project involved the participation of 29 Australian adults via the Survey Monkey online platform, customised by Deborah Lupton to present the story stems. A research company was used to recruit 30 participants from its research volunteer panels (1 participant completed their sociodemographic details but did not complete the stories). This participant cohort was not intended to provide a representative sample. However, we did request the company recruit approximately equal numbers of women and men and people from a wide spread of ages and geographical location around Australia so as to maximise heterogeneity of the group.

Of our 29 participants, 15 identified as female and 14 as male. The cohort ranged in age from 18 to 61 years; 2 participants were in their teens, 11 participants were in their 20s, 7 were in their 30s, 2 in their 40s, 6 in their 50s, and 1 was in their 60s. The majority of participants, 20 in total, identified as Anglo-Celtic. Of the remaining participants, 6 identified as Southern European, 1 as Northern European (German/Danish), 1 as Southern European/Southeast Asian, and 1 as English/Scottish/Maori. Our participants were geographically spread across the Australian states of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland, and the Northern Territory; 19 lived in cities and the remainder lived in rural areas. The majority of our participants were highly educated; 21 had completed a university degree, 5 had completed some university study, 1 had completed some post-school technical training, and 2 had completed their final year at school.

Method

Once recruited, participants were provided with a link that gave them access to the online project platform. They were then guided to respond to the same four story stems (below) by typing their responses into open textboxes. We configured the story stems as a way of helping participants to express their feelings about digital privacy and personal data (Lupton, 2017) and to identify the more-than-digital dimensions of their data assemblages. As well as asking participants to write about ‘What happens next?’, we specifically prompted them to describe how each character feels and what they do, so as to elicit responses about affects, relationships and materialities (building on the sociomaterial theoretical approach outlined earlier). Each of the scenarios was created by Lupton, drawing on previous studies on personal data use (Lupton, 2017) and examples of scandals concerning personal data privacy that have attracted attention in the Australian news media over the past few years. The prompts were:

1. Sarah has been feeling unusually sad and anxious, and wonders what’s wrong. She goes online and browses the Internet, searching for a diagnosis. The next time she logs on to Facebook, her feed is full of ads for mindfulness apps and yoga retreats.

How does Sarah feel? What does she do? What happens next?

2. Jon doesn’t use the Apple Maps app on his smartphone, but it starts sending him notifications about traffic on his way to work that demonstrates that the app has collected information about where he works and the route that he travels.

How does Jon feel? What does he do? What happens next?

3. Jane has a new baby. Although she is a regular user of Facebook and Instagram, she has decided not to post photos of her little one on these social media sites. One day, however, a notification pops up, informing Jane that her sister has posted a photo of Jane’s baby on her Facebook timeline.

How does Jane feel? What does she do? What happens next?

4. Steve uses a dating app to find partners. One day, he hears on the news that hackers have broken into the app developer’s archives and have posted many users’ details online, including their names, profiles and dating histories.

How does Steve feel? What does he do? What happens next?

Participants were asked to write four or more sentences beneath each prompt, and to ‘Please read the following hypothetical stories and complete the story by writing in full sentences. Be creative as you like – there are no right or wrong ways to complete the story’. The participants were given a week to complete the stories at a time that best suited them. Each participant was compensated for their time with a gift voucher worth AUD$30 (the standard compensation offered by the research company for involvement up to 30 minutes in length).

Analysis

Of the 29 people who completed the stories, all engaged generously with the story completion tasks and each produced four completed stories. This process resulted in a corpus of 116 narratives for analysis. Most narratives took the form of short, paragraph-length responses focused on characters’ feelings, characters making decisions about their dilemma or on taking next steps. We downloaded the completed stories from the SurveyMonkey platform into a Word document, initially organised according to participant, to facilitate analysis.

Our analytic approach is built on our previous research on the sociomaterialities of digital technologies and data (see Lupton, 2019). We adopted a more-than-human theory-informed analytic approach to ‘think with theory’ (Jackson and Mazzei, 2011). We sought to identify how participants imagine and make contextual sense of privacy issues by weaving more-than-digital elements together in their stories. For the purposes of the present analysis, we do not seek to make comparisons by the age, gender, or geographical location of the story writers. Rather, we considered the 116 stories as a corpus and focused on how affective forces and relational connections were described together with the generation of agential capacities: all concepts derived from our theoretical approach.

We identified these more-than-human elements in the story corpus through reading and discussion, first reading the stories independently to familiarise ourselves with the corpus before transposing these into a collaborative Word document. Using this, we together reviewed the corpus multiple times while revisiting, thinking, and writing with the theoretical literature, developing our interpretation in regular team meetings. Rather than coding the stories to derive theoretically-informed themes, in ‘thinking with theory’ we worked in ‘the threshold’ between theory and data (Jackson and Mazzei, 2013: 4–5), ‘plugging in’ each to each (Jackson and Mazzei, 2013: 2–4) so to orient our analysis with questions of why, where and how digital privacy matters. This approach to social inquiry is directed at identifying ‘making the mundane, taken-for-granted, everyday world visible’ through interpretative and narrative practices (Denzin, 2019: 723). We acknowledge that as with any inquiry (regardless of method), the story writers’ accounts and our interpretation of their narratives, including our selection of illustrative parts of their narratives, can only ever be partial, subjective, and contextual (Denzin, 2019). As Denzin (2019: 722) puts it, human experience (and by extension, social inquiry) ‘is a process. It is messy, open-ended, inconclusive, tangled up’. As part of ‘research-assemblages’ (Fox and Alldred, 2021), research participants and researchers always ‘do data together’ (Lydahl et al., 2020).

Digital privacy matters

Why privacy matters

An atmosphere of discomfort and anxiety, stemming from perceived intrusions or violations, was a dominant affective force in the completed stories. This is not unexpected, as each scenario involved characters facing digital privacy problems. However, the logics, directions, and ripples of negative affects were generative in the stories in revealing ways.

Stories about Steve featured particularly strong affective intensities: in response to a data leak on a dating app he uses, Steve ‘is aghast’ (P7), feels ‘violated’ (P8, P17, P28), ‘betrayed’ (P2, P13, P27), ‘embarrassed’ (P13, P15, P22, P25), ‘horrified’ (P18), ‘angry’ (P12, P17, P21, P22, P26, P27), ‘devastated’ (P25), ‘frustrated’ (P28), ‘upset’ (P21, P28), ‘anxious’ (P20, P29), ‘exposed and distrustful’ (P26) and feels ‘shame’ (P13). These feelings of shame, exposure, and devastation can be directly linked not only to the highly intimate and sensitive nature of the information that has been leaked from Steve’s use of a dating app but also the possibility that he may have been engaging in secretive or transgressive behaviour in using it.

Many narratives outlined the protagonists’ social relations to and connections with other people, as well as with the platforms or apps with which they are engaging. In Steve’s case, the intensity of anger, shame, and worry was deepened by social context. While concern over his personal information being ‘out there’ in an open abstract sense was present in many narratives, particularly intensified was the fear that people who Steve may know personally may find out that he uses a dating app (P6, P13, P15, P16, P18, P25, P29). As P6 described it:

Steve has always compartmentalised different aspects of his social life for ease and to avoid judgement. Steve is now extremely concerned that his colleagues will know about his dating life and judge him severely.

In such accounts, the complex networked and social nature of digital privacy, as well as the more-than-digital dimensions of the feelings it arouses, are exposed by the consequences of the leaking of app activities into the everyday world of relationships. However, not all stories imagined that Steve’s personal information would become publicly available. Some story writers suggested that Steve would aim to mitigate his potential stresses by talking with close relations and seeking support from the hacked company. In these more positive narratives, human agents provide in-person support to alleviate the distress of exposure.

Narratives about Jane involved the description of her feelings in responses to concerns about not only her own privacy, but that of her baby daughter. She was sometimes depicted as worrying that her baby daughter’s image was being targeted by social media, leading to inchoate anxiety her daughter’s digital privacy might be challenged now and into the future. Here again, narratives suggested that digital devices exerted a force on their human users, as in the following excerpt, which outlines a social media platform possessing unwarranted knowledge about Jane’s baby:

she feels a sense of dread begin to steadily rise. How could the social media site know that the infant in the photo is her daughter? The baby doesn’t have any social media accounts, and Jane hasn’t posted any photos of her. Jane feels her privacy has been violated, and worse, that her child’s has as well. She worries about the future of her baby. (P6)

Story writers’ narratives frequently portrayed protagonists as experiencing feelings of exploitation and confrontation relate to perceived transgressions by major companies such as Facebook, Apple, and Google. These portrayals express an intensity of feeling in which digital devices possess capacities to generate affects and agencies, including ‘spying’ on or ‘stalking’ people. To illustrate, in one story, Jon feels ‘used by Apple and decides never to buy another one of their products’ (P18). Jon’s dilemma in the story stem relates to information about his geolocation being shared from his smartphone to an app in a way that he had previously been unaware of, until he began receiving notifications from the app. Story writers noted that in Jon’s case, he ‘feels that his privacy has been violated’ (P13) and that ‘the app has been spying on him without his permission’ (P23).

Similarly, for the protagonist named as Sarah, who searched online for information about mental health and received Facebook ads for mindfulness apps and yoga retreats, story writers often referred to her affective responses as feeling ‘like the Internet is “stalking” her’ (P28). As these words suggest, a dominant story frame positions technology companies as having the agential capacity to ‘watch’ and ‘know’ people. For example, Sarah’s responses were often contextualised within a broader imaginary concerning the ‘all-seeing’ nature of Facebook. She is described as feeling that the targeted ads she receives are ‘intrusive and that Facebook knows too much about her’ (P1). In the words of P19:

Sarah is a bit disturbed by the ad targeting algorithms of Facebook. After all, she never searched for yoga retreats and the connection of this to feeling sad and anxious that Facebook has made is troublesome. (P19)

In response to this sense of surveillance, Sarah was described as feeling ‘annoyed’ and ‘disconcerted’ (P28), ‘bombarded’ and ‘frustrated’ (P20). As a result, her feelings of anxiety intensify. In such stories, Sarah’s affective responses are portrayed as part of a general distrust of how search engines and Facebook operate to share personal information, including highly sensitive material such as a person’s mental health status. As P8 put it: ‘She wonders how Facebook now knows that she needs help in the area of relaxation/mindfulness etc’.

In stories about Jane, a negative affective tension was often described in the narratives as stemming from her personal relationship with her sister, who has shared an image of Jane’s baby on Facebook. In numerous stories, Jane was portrayed as feeling ‘betrayed’, ‘let down’ and/or ‘annoyed’ (P3, P4, P6, P7, P9, P15, P16, P17, P18, P19, P24, P27) by her sister’s actions. In other stories, however, it was noted that Jane’s sister may have inadvertently posted the image, not knowing that Jane did not want them on social media. As P22 wrote, ‘how can [Jane] be angry with her sister, when she hadn’t told her that she didn’t want photos posted on social media? (P22)’.

As this latter story suggests, not all narratives recounted intense affects. An affective atmosphere of ambivalence, or changing affective modes, coloured many of the completed stories. In the case of Jane, from the details provided in the story stem, it is unclear whether her sister knows about Jane’s policy of not posting images of her baby. The story writers differed in their assumptions about whether Jane’s sister had contravened Jane’s wishes. Jane’s affective responses in these stories are less those of betrayal and more anger, frustration, or annoyance – including at herself for not making her wishes clear to her family members. In these accounts, the personal and long-standing trusting relationship that Jane was imagined to have with her sister was portrayed as alleviating any anger or betrayal that Jane might have felt.

While numerous stories featured the negative implications of devices and Internet companies having the capacity to know people, this was sometimes portrayed as benefitting device users. An excerpt from a story featuring Jon is one example. In this case, the feeling that one is ‘known’ leads not to fear or anxiety, but rather trust in and admiration at the ‘intelligence’ of the technology:

Jon is excited and impressed his phone is so clever. He explores the settings and options to understand what it knows about him and finds ‘frequent locations’ are recorded. John reads up online about artificial intelligence and machine learning and decides this is a really clever application of the technology. John relaxes and relies on his phone to give him trustworthy traffic information. (P29)

Rather than representing protagonists as feeling violated or exploited by a company or technology, such stories highlighted the complications such technologies bring to existing social relations – relations in which privacy transgressions are not new phenomena but instead are newly mediated by social media. In the case of the other three protagonists, devices, apps, and other technological platforms were frequently described as offering convenient services, such as warning of traffic delays, finding health information, or dating prospects. Not coincidentally, Sarah’s and Jon’s actions both involve using the Internet or apps for seeking or receiving helpful information: Sarah is looking online for information about how to improve her mental health, while Jon is offered notifications that could help him navigate his way to work. Story writers responded accordingly, acknowledging these benefits. For example:

Sarah is initially perplexed that these ads appear and first wonder if Facebook is monitoring her conversations, as her conspiracy-theorist friends suggest. However, she recalls she searched for these things, and does remember clicking the Facebook ‘like’ button on some websites. Sarah is then impressed the Facebook advertisements are targeted towards her. She decides to click on an ad and explore some relaxation options for her demographic. (P29)

As in this story, some participants crafted a narrative arc in which protagonists’ initial affective responses change as they consider their dilemmas more closely and realise that, in fact, they have benefitted from their personal data being processed.

How privacy matters

Agential capacities for action were frequently the topic of the stories. In numerous narratives, characters – particularly Jon and Sarah – are unsure about what to do next and have conflicted feelings (P2, P3, P5, P6, P17, P18, P20, P22). For instance:

Sarah feels a bit exposed and uncomfortable with the feeling that someone has been watching her. But she takes a closer look at some of the information and decides that it could be useful. She downloads a few of the free aps and opens one to give it a go. (P5)

As this excerpt suggests, even when such convenience is explicitly recognised in the narrative arcs, this does not ameliorate the expression of concerns about the opaque nature with which such technologies operate. Issues of consent about personal data access remain, as does concern regarding how to prevent third party access of personal information.

Alternatively, in some stories, a sense of personal responsibility for data privacy means both blame and agency are distributed across actors. For instance:

Steve feels like he’s done something wrong and has something to hide. He shouldn’t have to worry about hackers when he’s gone through a legit company. (P10)

Jane feels that she has let herself down by not making it clear to her followers that no pictures are to be posted. (P14)

In other narratives, the intensity of negative affects is shifted or resolved via responsibilisation, where increased future agency is afforded by changed practices or different settings of personal technology use. One story writer, for example, framed Jon’s possible actions by writing, ‘If he is really worried about it, then he might look into possibly deleting the Maps app, or even maybe moving to an Android phone if he is seriously concerned about Apple’s Maps app’ (P1). Further, they write, ‘If Jon is very serious about maintaining his own privacy, he might even look into installing a VPN on his phone which could encrypt or obscure his actual travels and whereabouts’ (P1). In this example, Jon’s affective responses to his dilemma are positioned as potentially motivating him to consider solutions that involve significant technical knowledge or personal expense (buying a new phone). Here again, there is a distribution of agential capacities between the human user and the affordances of the technology, but with an emphasis on the human as acting.

A more complex distribution of agency can be seen in some narratives, which involves not simply an individual person and the technologies with which they are intra-acting but also other people. Narratives depicted the scenarios of people working with the affordances of digital technologies to disadvantage others. For example, P18’s narrative responding to Jon’s dilemma noted that his anxiety about the tracking of his geolocation data stems from his concern that:

if Apple has this information who else does? A criminal may be able to hack into his phone thus knowing his work and route travelled. It could lead to him being ambushed and car jacked. Maybe the criminal wants to rob his work. (P18)

Relationality, in a social and more-than-human sense, was also a key feature where more positive affective forces run through the stories. In many responses, characters make sense of and act through their situation with others – this includes the data privacy issue posed in the story stem but also extends beyond it. These actions often involved seeking the help or advice of another person, thereby establishing relational connections or building on established ones.

For Jon, many story writers imagined him feeling uncomfortable and lacking/wanting control over how his location is tracked by his smartphone. In response, he is portrayed as tweaking his location tracking settings across his apps, reaching out to technology companies for assistance and to complain, and sharing his experience with colleagues who together talk through ways of dealing with the situation. For Sarah’s scenario, story writers often imagined her as experiencing compounded anxiety and stress due to the targeted ads she sees, which was variably addressed by seeking further information or services or disengaging with technology. In stories where she resisted the ads targeted to her, Sarah gains agency with and through the relationships she turns to for support including her doctor (P4, P14, P19, P23) and family members and friends (P8, P10, P24, P26, P28). In one story, Sarah does pay attention to information in the targeted ads, and finds benefit from the information she is about to source:

She then Googles health retreats, yoga retreats to see what’s nearby. She rings friends to ask if they have been to any of these locally. She searches Trip Advisor to get recommendations by other guests for such retreats. Eventually she decides on one, phones and books into a retreat. (P26)

In Jane’s case, the fact that it was Jane’s sister who posted the picture of her baby also meaningfully complicates Jane’s reaction to the post. The relational context of the privacy ‘problem’ influences the affective force and intensity and shows the socially embedded nature of the boundaries and meaning of data privacy:

Initially Jane is angry that her sister has done this even though the photo of baby Emily is adorable. Before she can stop herself, she has hit the like button and then notices there are 23 other likes and 6 comments. ‘What a gorgeous baby”. “Aw how cute”. The reaction just proved she had the most beautiful baby ever. Suddenly she realises that her anger has been replaced with pride. And also, how can she be angry with her sister, when she hadn’t told her that she didn’t want photos posted on social media. (P22)

Story writers frequently imagined Jane’s frustrations as chiefly lying with her sister. In these narratives, she addresses this familial tension by talking directly with her sister and by seeking support from other family members and friends.

Central for understanding the everyday practices depicted in these narratives are the affective atmospheres of anxiety recounted in many stories. Characters were often portrayed as concerned about their personal data being accessed by both abstract persons or companies and by known people in their social networks. These portrayals show that the only tangible impact of many of these potentially intrusive services for many characters is increased convenience. Responses to Sarah’s predicament bring this home most clearly. In one illustrative story, Sarah:

feels like her privacy has been violated and there is some link between what she Googles and what Facebook ads pop up. At the same time, however, she does nothing about it. She does not feel violated enough to seek help from a doctor rather than online. She still likes the ease and efficiency of searching the internet for diagnoses. (P17)

The term ‘enough’ in this response highlights the relational and contextual boundaries of what constitutes a meaningful privacy problem. The ways in which people develop agential capacities to address or respond to these problems are bound up with affective forces and the affordances of human–nonhuman personal data assemblages.

Discussion

Our study sought to complicate and expand the notion of agency in relation to digital privacy and demonstrate the value of a narrative approach that is combined with a feminist materialist perspective. The stories written by our participants vividly demonstrate how the sense-making concepts and practices in which people engage around data privacy issues are entangled with technological affordances, human and nonhuman relational connections and affective intensities. While each story stem prompted participants to write about the feelings and actions of one character in particular, working with these concepts allowed us to de-centre the tactical individual in our analysis and consider the distributed socialities, agencies and materialities of privacy through the complex human–nonhuman intra-actions which the narratives depict.

Previous scholarship has emphasised that digital privacy is continuously mediated within/through social contexts and relationships as well as digital technologies (Nissenbaum, 2020). Digital privacy is understood as a shared problem, yet is seen as requiring individual agency to control (Marwick and Boyd, 2014). Agency in this sense is often addressed through various ‘literacy’ projects: referred to as ‘digital literacies’ or ‘data literacies’ (Bakir, 2017). Lee’s (2019) story completion study identified some interesting nuance in people’s understandings of these issues. For instance, Lee (2019: 962) described what the stories reveal about ‘the vulnerabilities of the system’ and ‘the ways in which the system and apps permeate people’s lives’. While she does acknowledge that ‘technologies, smartphone applications and platforms play a significant role as facilitators and actors’ in the stories, this focus largely remains on the agential capacities of humans: how people ‘increasingly equip themselves with ways to work around the technology’ (2019: 961). Our findings build on these insights in demonstrating that across the story corpus, affects and agencies were complex and multiple; annoyance, worry, embarrassment, reassurance and, notably, ambivalence knotted with the distributed capacities that together, people, devices, and companies did, could or desired to exercise. Such affective forces are key to the liveliness of human-nonhuman assemblages, and the agential capacities that they do (and do not) generate (Lupton, 2019) .

Privacy was an explicit concern in approximately one-third of the completed stories and portrayed as a dynamic and relational issue about which people have complex feelings. Affects tangle with characters’ perceptions about blame and responsibility in their data privacy problem: whether the at-fault party is presented as a technology company, their personal device, their particular forms of use of such devices, or someone they know. The logics of why particular affects are aroused in the narratives relates by who or what characters feel violated, and what responses they imagined as being within or beyond their agential capacities. Story writers frequently crafted a narrative arc in which the protagonist, impelled by affective forces, takes some kind of action. Importantly, however, across the stories, it is not only the protagonists who are recognised as possessing agency – whether in an exercised or diminished form. Agency in digital privacy dilemmas was portrayed as a complicated relational and dynamic capacity variably construed across the unfolding scenarios, involving vibrant intra-actions between humans and affordances of the technologies. In some cases, human–nonhuman technological assemblages were positioned as beneficent, in others, malevolent. In most cases, the assemblages are attributed human-like capacities to ‘know’ other humans, albeit with the implied use of artificial intelligence.

In our participants’ stories, digital privacy was commonly a complex multilayered issue about which people feel ambivalent. This ambivalence is different from the resignation or apathy described in previous research on digital privacy. While affects of anxiety and discomfort were common, the completed stories highlight the agential dimensions of people’s imaginaries of digital privacy. When considering, as prompted, how the protagonists ‘feel’, the main threats that the story writers identified related to challenges to the ontological security of the protagonists: feeling watched, anxious, annoyance, feeling a degree of invasion or intrusion into privacy, feeling ‘spied on’, losing trust in an app or platform. To a lesser degree, the potential for identity theft or for secret behaviour to be revealed to friends or family members (as in Steve’s case of using a dating app) were described as disturbing consequences of invasions of digital privacy. Feeling watched was described as ‘uncomfortable’: a vague unsettling feeling. Specific implications were not often spelt out in narratives: that is, why it was unsettling that an app or Internet service was tracking the protagonists was not explained in detail, nor were the ramifications of such feelings for human and nonhuman relations.

Conclusion

Attending to more-than-human complexities is important for better understanding how digital privacy comes to matter in people’s everyday relationships and lives. To consider what is afforded in the human/nonhuman assemblage that makes up each scenario is not to (only) identify what dots must be connected between varied personal knowledge and digital tools, in order for agential capacities to manage digital privacy to be opened. Employing the story completion method with a conceptual approach drawn from feminist materialism allows us to critically engage with the affective, relational and contextual significance of digital privacy issues. Using this perspective, we have surfaced dimensions of why and how the potential for and meaning of privacy unfolds, which are themselves inevitably intertwined in complex relations of sociomaterial phenomena. So too, our findings identify more-than-digital aspects of digital privacy. The privacy problems posed in the story stems related to personal data and were digital in nature. However, their scope extended beyond these technological elements. This ran across each of the scenarios, as varying public relationships and platforms were portrayed as more or less appropriate for the same kinds of personal information.

Discussions of digital privacy tactics and literacies that do not centre contextual affective forces and relational connections are limited in their understandings of how digital privacy is socially made. Our findings show that how people experience and collectively understand privacy is contingent upon the relations, affects and affordances generated by of human–nonhuman assemblages. The story completion method highlights how people imagine the liveliness of these elements in a social sense; that is, not in a reflective mode, drawing explicitly on their lived experiences, but in a creative and imaginative way that considers the lives of others. The narratives here offer insights into how issues such as digital privacy dilemmas are understood as simultaneously personal and social, redolent with forces of feeling and created by relationships with human and nonhuman agents. Digital privacy dilemmas are ‘collective manifestings’ (Hernández et al., 2020: 21), and speculative methods such as story completion can aid researchers in probing and surfacing the complex entanglements of their manifestings.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (grant number CE200100005).

Author biographies

Ash Watson is a sociologist of fiction and technology. Her research uses arts-based and qualitative methods to explore the sociocultural impacts of emerging technologies and identify the kinds of futures being opened or closed off by current trends. She is particularly interested in the visions and practices of DIY collectives, including startups and community archives. Ash’s debut novel Into the Sea (2020), published in Brill’s award-winning Social Fictions Series, is ‘an experiment in sociological imagination’. She is Fiction Editor of The Sociological Review and creator of So Fi Zine (sofizine.com). She tweets at .

Deborah Lupton is SHARP Professor in the Faculty of Arts, Design & Architecture, University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney, Australia. Her research is interdisciplinary, spanning sociology, communication, and cultural studies. She is located in the Centre for Social Research in Health and the Social Policy Research Centre, leading both the Vitalities Lab and the UNSW Node of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. She is an elected fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and holds an Honorary Doctorate in Social Science awarded by the University of Copenhagen.

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