This area of research investigates the privacy implications of digital technologies, including how privacy issues influence user behavior and how people protect themselves from risks online.
Led by PhD Candidate Shruti Sannon, the SML has several projects examining privacy issues in multiple technological contexts.
This area of work focuses on developing a better understanding of people’s perceived privacy risks and protective behaviors with social media and new technologies. In one study, we investigated how people tell lies to protect their privacy when interacting with people and systems online, a phenomenon we conceptualized as “privacy lies”. We identified a number of factors that predicted whether people would tell these types of lies, and found that people told these lies for a variety of reasons.
One study examined how people with invisible chronic illnesses make decisions about how to disclose sensitive information about their health conditions on social media. This study provided an in-depth cross-comparative analysis of multiple social media platforms, including the challenges they involve.
Another study in this research area examined how people perceive privacy violations committed by conversational agents; this work drew on traditional interpersonal communication theories and extended it to interactions with social agents.
Sannon, S., Stoll, B., DiFranzo, D., Jung, M., & Bazarova, N. (2020). “I just shared your responses”: Extending Communication Privacy Management Theory to Interactions with Conversational Agents. In Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (GROUP ’20).
Sannon, S., Murnane, E., Bazarova, N. N., & Gay, G. (2019). “I was really, really nervous posting it”: Communicating about invisible chronic illnesses across social media platforms. Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’19). Glasgow, UK.
Sannon, S., Bazarova, N. N., & Cosley, D. (2018). Privacy lies: Understanding how, when, and why people lie to protect their privacy in multiple online contexts. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’18). Montreal QC, Canada: ACM Press.
Sannon, S., Murnane, E., Bazarova, N.N., & Gay, G. (2018). Managing Privacy While Managing Pain: A Mixed Methods Study of Health Disclosures on Social Media. Technology, Mind & Society. Washington, DC.
Sannon, S. (2017). When Privacy is Painful: Designing for Multiple Needs and Trade-offs. CSCW 2017 Workshop on Networked Privacy. Portland, OR.