‘A right to be forgotten’: retrospective privacy concerns in social networking services

ABSTRACT

To gain a heuristic understanding of the temporal dimension of privacy, we propose the concept of retrospective privacy concerns and explore its antecedents, through the lens of contextual integrity framework. We collected 276 respondents and then conducted partial least squares to test our hypotheses. The results show life change experiences and information relevance impact retrospective impression management concerns, which, in turn, exert an effect on retrospective privacy concerns. Information dissemination regarding sharing information to only selected friends perceived higher level of control than sharing information to all friends, while perceived control could enhance retrospective privacy concerns. Also, users who feel under surveillance would be concerned about their retrospective privacy. Moreover, we verify the effect of time on retrospective privacy concerns and information relevance. This work provides new insight into the temporal dimension of privacy and offers practical implications for designing temporal privacy tools to mitigate users’ concerns.

KEYWORDS:

• Retrospective privacy concerns
• time collapse
• contextual integrity
• social networking services

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under [grant number JBK2101026, JBK2202046].