Abstract
The concept of privacy has been widely discussed in the literature of the 20th century. While the classic theories from Alan Westin, Irwin Altman, and even Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis still offer valid approaches to privacy research, they can only partly be applied to the online world. The internet has fundamentally changed the patterns of private communication including rules of self-disclosure, self-expression, and identity management as well as of privacy protection. The technological and associated socio-psychological developments contribute to the specific tension evolving between users’ desires to communicate online and their assumptions about their privacy in the Social Web. In the introduction to this volume, Joseph B. Walther observes: “The more users disclose of themselves, the more they may enjoy the benefits these systems have to offer. At the same time, the more they disclose, the more they risk what they themselves consider breaches of their privacy” (p. 3). Personal information is the currency of online social networks. It is accessible to a vast number of people one knows or doesn’t know. This new situation demands answers to the questions of how we can conceptualize and model privacy for online contexts.
The present anthology gives a helpful overview of how traditional privacy research can be reasonably continued or adapted in the light of online communication. It offers insights into the current state of privacy research, proposes new theoretical and empirical approaches, and thus provides groundwork for further discussion. The 18 contributions, composed by an international authorship from communication and psychology backgrounds, are divided into the three parts: ‘Approaches’, ‘Applications’ and ‘Audiences’.
The discussion of how users employ different strategies of disclosure and privacy control online is one of the core issues of this book. The ‘Approaches’ section, with 11 chapters, is also the most extensive part of the book. It is introduced by Stephen T. Margulis, who gives the reader an overview of the three most important theories of privacy: Altman’s, Westin’s and Sandra Petronio’s approaches. Petronio’s communication privacy management (CPM) theory is regarded as being particularly suitable for privacy research in online social networks, with its focus on the management of private information via a system of rules for revealing and concealing information. Altman’s ideas regarding privacy also get substantial treatment in this volume, as in the chapter by Adam N. Joinson et al. (Chapter 4), who develop Altman’s concept of crowding and adapt it for the domain of digital communication. The conceptualization of online privacy behaviour can also be assisted through application of the theory of social capital (Nicole Ellison et al., Chapter 3), the uses and gratifications approach (Monika Taddicken and Cornelia Jers, Chapter 11) or a comparison of online and offline behaviour (Nicole C. Krämer and Nina Haferkamp, Chapter 10). In Chapter 5, Bernhard Debatin discusses the principle of self-determination as the underlying moral precept and right ‘that enables individuals to control access to their private sphere and to regulate the flow and context of their information’ (p. 51). Using a psychological perspective, Sabine Trepte and Leonard Reinecke assess the dialectic management of disclosure and privacy in Chapter 6 by arguing that ‘online spaces of privacy are controlled and created because they grant spaces for authentic living’ (p. 71).
Those different spaces of performing privacy online are the subject of the second part of the book: ‘Applications’. Here, the concept of online privacy is discussed in the context of specific activities such as microblogging, social network sites or mobile media. This section deals with the question of how users can manage and satisfy their needs of privacy within the various technological restrictions. It also contributes to the meta-discussion of how to define online privacy with respect to its multifaceted applications. This is especially interesting for the apparently contradictory realms like privacy and mobility or privacy and journalism. The first distinction refers to the problem of bringing together the two concepts on a theoretical level: “mobility is supposedly on the rise[,]…while privacy is supposedly diminishing…Privacy is…more philosophical and therefore debatable, while mobility can at least partly be measured” (p. 193, Maren Hartmann, Chapter 14). The underlying conclusion of this chapter that the concept of privacy stays interwoven with its corresponding or opposing concepts (i.e. public, journalism, etc.), gets confirmed in Chapter 15: Wiebke Loosen emphasizes that a clear-cut, single definition of privacy might even be counterproductive as it ‘necessarily needs to be context-sensitive’ (p. 206).
Another important finding of the second book section is that it is actually the user who defines privacy in the Social Web by actively controlling the kind and content of disclosed information. Here, however, the issue of the privacy paradox (the gap between privacy concerns on the one hand and disclosure on the other) emerges as the crucial weak point. This is especially the case for adolescents’ use of the Social Web, as Jochen Peter and Patti M. Valkenburg state at the beginning of the third section of the book. While adolescents often present personal information online in a careless manner, making them easy targets for commercial or emotional fraud, elderly internet users try to minimize the risks or costs of self-disclosing behaviour (Wiebke Maaß, Chapter 17). Apart from the age category that reveals different strategies of performing privacy online, Mike Thelwall presents the gender perspective as a key component to explain individual privacy practices (Chapter 18).
All in all, Privacy Online draws a discerning picture of how privacy can be conceptualized for the digital environment. Usually it is an inherent shortcoming of anthologies that they cannot provide deeper insights into the different ideas presented. However, it is the strength of this book that it discusses a variety of aspects of privacy online while managing to keep a central theme: although social media platforms do accommodate the individual’s needs for self-disclosure and identity management, one has to consider the technological, individual or even demographical particularities when theorizing privacy online.