جامعة أم القرى
Around the world, millions of internet users interact with others over social media where billions of photos are uploaded every day. With boundaries between offline and online spaces blurring, one’s behavior can be stripped of its context and go viral in seconds, causing severe personal, social, and professional consequences.
These can include a stain on one’s reputation that never fades – not only for the content owner but other parties involved (e.g., content co-owners and bystanders).
In today’s networked world, individuals live in an ongoing process of negotiating and managing their personal information, privacy, and identity to present themselves as they wish without harming relationships that matter the most.
Therefore, understanding users’ concerns, needs, and practices in the era of pervasive photography and abundant social networking sites is key to helping them overcome the challenges of managing their privacy and identity.
Through three user studies we aim to identify effective collaboration management mechanisms for social media users to regulate and negotiate privacy for social media content and impose sanctions when those regulations are violated.
Using a holistic approach we introduce an experience model of a shared digital photo’s lifespan across time, space, and people that focuses on the ‘workarounds’ young adults devise to overcome technological challenges encountered when managing their privacy.
The experience model informs the creation of a design opportunity map highlighting how extant and future designs can address users’ privacy concerns, on individual and across a photo’s lifespan stages. We then systematize sanctioning strategies used by college students that address violations of appropriate content sharing on social media.
We propose that designing for transparency rather than conformity, making norms visible and signaling norm violations, can help users take an active role in the sanctioning process without confronting violators or harming social vii relationships.
Moreover, to broaden our understanding of how changes in societal norms influence users’ privacy
practices, we investigate how Saudi women today manage their privacy and identity in the light of increasingly flexible norms around photography and use of social media. Our findings highlight secrecy practices to which these women were engaged in to manage the ongoing tension of expressing their autonomous selves without abandoning the collective self.
We propose designing for secrecy through designing for trust to provide users with more control over their private information while having a space to adjust their expectations of others.
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