Disclosure Management on Social Network Sites: Individual Privacy Perceptions and User-Directed Privacy Strategies

The social web and specifically social network sites (SNS) have offered new opportunities for interaction and communication, but have also increased the risk of privacy violations. In this study, we investigated how far users imply different disclosure management strategies in status updates and chat conversations. We hypothesized that users perceive specific information as differently private depending on their personal privacy preference, but generally show the same disclosure management pattern: the higher the perceived privacy level of an information, the less frequently it will be shared. We tested the hypothesis using an online survey with 316 German SNS users. The findings suggest that respondents engaged in disclosure management taking both communication channel and type of information into account. We further found that trust toward SNS contacts and use of privacy settings significantly influenced disclosure management in one-to-many (status updates) but not in one-to-one communications situations (chat conversations). The results complement existing research by showing the pivotal role of individual privacy perceptions in explaining users' privacy management in the social web.