A balancing act: how risk mitigation strategies employed by users explain the privacy paradox on social media

ABSTRACT

While there is a growing body of literature on information privacy suggesting different mechanisms of how people’s privacy concerns might be impacting their attitudes and behaviour when using social media, recent questionable data use practices by social media platforms and third parties call for a renewed validation of existing information privacy models. The objective of this research is to re-examine the variables predicting why people disclose information on social media. Building on previous work, this paper puts forward a comprehensive Privacy Concerns and Social Media Use Model (PC-SMU) and evaluates it in a specific cultural and legal environment (social media users from a single county, Canada). The study delves into the privacy paradox and shows that the benefits of using social media are the main driver of self-disclosure, and that self-disclosing behaviours are nuanced by the users’ information privacy protection strategies. We also find that higher levels of social media literacy, and concerns about organisational threats to a lesser extent, lead to higher levels of information privacy management, emphasizing the importance of educating users about how to use the different privacy and security features provided by social media platforms.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media
• information privacy
• privacy paradox
• self-disclosure
• social media literacy
• trust beliefs

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable feedback and all survey participants for taking part in the study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Cheung, Lee, and Chan (2015) refer to this dimension as ‘Convenience of Maintaining Existing Relationships’.

2 Gruzd and Hernández-García (2018) and Jacobson, Gruzd, and Hernández-García (2020) found HTMT correlations over 0.850, but below 0.900.

3 It is worth noting that, other than the use of lists, the items measuring preventive strategies in Cho and Filippova (2016) are completely different from the ones in Li, Cho, and Goh (2019). Our analysis might then question the adequacy of directly applying the measures of Li, Cho, and Goh (2019) in the future.

4 Other digital technologies, such as videoconferencing systems (e.g., Zoom, Skype) have also been instrumental in satisfying the need for social communication.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Canada Research Chair in Privacy-Preserving Digital Technologies [950-232741; PI: Gruzd].