Networked privacy: How teenagers negotiate context in social media

While much attention is given to young people’s online privacy practices on sites like Facebook, current theories of privacy fail to account for the ways in which social media alter practices of information-sharing and visibility. Traditional models of privacy are individualistic, but the realities of privacy reflect the location of individuals in contexts and networks. The affordances of social technologies, which enable people to share information about others, further preclude individual control over privacy. Despite this, social media technologies primarily follow technical models of privacy that presume individual information control. We argue that the dynamics of sites like Facebook have forced teens to…

• JD
  John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
• MR
  Microsoft Research