Search results

In a world where different communication technologies support social connection, managing unavailability is as important as, if not more important than, managing availability. The need to manage unavailability becomes increasingly critical when users employ several communication tools to interact with various ties. A person's availability information disclosure may depend on different social relationships and the technologies used by the person. The study contributes to the literature by drawing on privacy management theory to investigate how users practice availability management and use its deceptive form, which is sometimes called a butler lie, with various ties across different messaging applications (apps) as part of their online privacy. Relevant factors in mediated communication, including facework, common ground, and interpersonal trust, are included in the developed model.

The authors conducted an online survey (n = 475) to explore the relationship between one's contact with different interactants (significant others, family members, close friends, acquaintances, groups of friends, and groups of acquaintances) and one's practice of availability management and use of butler lies with these interactants at different size levels on various messaging apps.

Factors such as facework, privacy related to technology, and privacy related to social relationships affect the practice of availability management and the use of butler lies. Notably, butler lies are used most frequently with acquaintances and groups of acquaintances and least frequently with significant others. Moreover, the practice of availability management and the use of butler lies are negatively moderated by people's conversational grounding and trust.

The study examined the practice of cross-app availability management with diverse social ties on mobile technologies, which is a socio-informatic practice that is widely adopted in the contemporary digital landscape but on which limited scientific and theoretic research has been conducted. No research has directly investigated users' availability management across multiple apps from a relational perspective. Building on the theoretical framework of privacy management, the paper aims to bridge the gap in the relevant literature. The results of this study can serve as a reference for library professionals to develop information literacy programs according to users' availability management needs. The results also provide insights to system designers for developing messaging tools.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the various enablers of and constraints on employees' information sharing on an enterprise social media platform. It draws on two theoretical perspectives, communication privacy management theory and the technology affordance framework, as well as on empirical data in an attempt to paint a comprehensive picture of the factors shaping employees' decisions to share or not share information on enterprise social media.

This qualitative field study is based on semi-structured interviews and enterprise social media review data from a large Nordic media organization.

On an enterprise social media platform, privacy management principles shape employees' information-sharing decisions in relation to personal privacy boundaries, professional boundaries and assumed risks, online safety concerns and perceived audience. Additionally, the technological affordances of visibility, awareness, persistence and searchability shape employees' information sharing in varying and sometimes even contradictory ways. Finally, organizational factors, such as norms, tasks and media repertoires, are associated with employees' information-sharing decisions. Together, these three dimensions, personal, technological and organizational, form a model of the enablers of and constraints on employees' decisions to share information on enterprise social media.

This study extends the understanding of different factors shaping employees' decisions to share or not share information on enterprise social media. It extends the two applied theories by uniquely combining interpersonal privacy management principles with a technological affordance framework that focuses on the relationship between the user and the technology. This research also furthers the authors' knowledge of what privacy management principles mean in the organizational context. This study shows connections between the two theories and extends the understanding of technology affordances as not only action possibilities but also constraining factors. Additionally, by revealing what kinds of factors encourage and inhibit information sharing on enterprise social media, the results of this study support organizations in their efforts to manage information sharing on enterprise social media systems.

While anonymous online interactions could be helpful and less risky, they are usually not enough for LGBTQ+ people to satisfy the need of expressing their marginalized identity to networks of known ties (i.e. on identified social media like Facebook, WeChat, and TikTok). However, identified social media bring LGBTQ+ people both sources and challenges like “context collapse” that flattens diverse networks or audiences that are originally separated. Previous studies focus on LGBTQ+ people's disclosure and responses to context collapse, few studies investigate how their perceptions of context collapse are shaped and their privacy management beyond regulating disclosure on social media. Drawing on identity theory and communication privacy management (CPM), this study aims to investigate how the need of LGBTQ+ people for self-identity affects their perceived context collapse and results in privacy management on identified social media.

Given the target population is LGBTQ+ people, The authors recruited participants through active LGBTQ+ online communities, influential LGBTQ+ activists, and the snowballing sampling. The authors empirically examined the proposed model using the PLS-SEM technique with a valid sample of 232 respondents concerning their identity practices and privacy management on WeChat, a typical and popular identified social media in China.

The results suggested that the need for expressing the self and the need for maintaining continuity of self-identity have significant influences on perceived context collapse, but vary in directions. The perceived context collapse will motivate LGBTQ+ individuals to engage in privacy management to readjust rules on ownership, access, and extension. However, only ownership management helps them regain the perceived privacy control on social media.

This study incorporated and highlighted the influence of LGBTQ+ identity in shaping context collapse and online privacy management. This study contributes to the literature on privacy and information communication and yields practical implications, especially on improving privacy-related interactive design for identified social media services.

Based on communication privacy management (CPM) theory, this study aimed to explore how gender and age criteria, motivational criterion (locatability), benefit-risk ratio criteria (perceived benefits of privacy information disclosure and privacy concerns), contextual criteria (privacy experience) and boundary coordination and turbulence (perceived effectiveness of privacy policy) interact and combine in leading to voice assistant (VA) users' intention to reveal or conceal their privacy information.

A questionnaire was designed and distributed to car drivers who have intelligent VA use experience while driving. A total of 230 valid responses were collected. The fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) approach was used to analyse the data.

Via configuration analysis with fsQCA, five equivalent configurations leading to the high intention of disclosing privacy information, and one configuration leading to the intention of concealing privacy information were identified. Four theoretical configurational propositions were proposed. Moreover, the theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.

This study offers some insightful implications in the field of private information communication in artificial intelligence applications as well as practical implications for intelligent VA application design. The findings provide empirical evidence of privacy communication management in the context of smart VA usage.

This study investigates how different parental mediation strategies (active versus restrictive) and teen Douyin users' privacy risk perceptions are associated with their privacy management behaviors.

An online survey with teen Douyin users (N = 500) was administered in mainland China.

Perceived privacy risk leads teenagers to implement stricter privacy management strategies. However, different types of parental mediation have different impacts on teens' privacy management behaviors. Discussion-based active mediation is positively correlated with privacy disclosure and privacy boundary linkage, while rule-based restrictive mediation is positively associated with privacy boundary control. In addition, active mediation encourages teens to use their own judgment about privacy risks when deciding how much personal information to disclose and with whom they want to share their information. Conversely, restrictive mediation results in teens making decisions about disclosing private information without taking their own risk assessments into account.

Video-sharing social media platforms like TikTok and Douyin have become a cultural trend among teen social media users. However, loss of privacy is a potentially serious downside of using such platforms. Despite the platforms' popularity among this age group, little is known about the ways teens manage their privacy on such social media platforms. By examining how teens' privacy risk perception and parental intervention shape three different aspects of privacy boundary management (i.e. privacy disclosure, privacy boundary linkage, and privacy boundary control), this study provides a comprehensive understanding of teen Douyin users' privacy management.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the business communication-related variables of reputation, communication quality and information sensitivity are mediated by trust and privacy concern to influence the privacy dyad (i.e. promotion- and prevention-focused privacy behaviors).

Regulatory focus theory (RFT) is used to build a framework to examine antecedents of promotion- and prevention-focused privacy behaviors as well as mediators of these relationships. Hypotheses were tested using a 2 (firm reputation: strong/weak)×3 (communication quality: high/neutral/low)×2 (data sensitivity: high/low) between-subjects factorial design.

The findings support the proposed model. Specifically, high reputation and communication quality increased promotion-focused behaviors and were mediated by trust. In contrast, low communication quality and high data sensitivity increased prevention-focused behaviors and were mediated by privacy concern. Consistent with RFT, higher trust led to promotion-focused behaviors such as willingness to invest in the relationship (e.g., by providing information to the service provider and investing time and energy) and loyalty behaviors. Furthermore, higher privacy concerns led to prevention-focused behaviors such as deflective (e.g., using privacy protection measures such as disguising one’s IP address and disabling cookies) and defensive behaviors (e.g., taking action to have one’s name removed from mailing lists).

This study contributes to the literature on customer relationship management, RFT and trust and privacy in an online context.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate privacy boundaries and explores employees’ reactions in employee monitoring.

The research used the metaphor of boundary turbulence in the Communication Privacy Management (CPM) theory to demonstrate the psychological effect on employees. The model comprised organizational culture, CPM, trust, and employee performance in employee monitoring to further investigated the influence exerted by organizational culture and how employees viewed their trust within the organization when implementing employee monitoring. Variables were measured empirically by administrating questionnaires to full-time employees in organizations that currently practice employee monitoring.

The findings showed that a control-oriented organizational culture raised communication privacy turbulence in CPM. The communication privacy turbulence in CPM mostly had negative effects on trust in employee monitoring policy, but not on trust in employee monitoring members. Both trust in employee monitoring policy and trust in employee monitoring members had positive effects on employee commitment and compliance to employee monitoring.

This research applied the CPM theory in workplace privacy to explore the relationship between employees’ privacy and trust. The results provide insights of why employees feel psychological resistance when they are forced to accept the practice of employee monitoring. In addition, this study explored the relationship between CPM and trust, and offer support and verification to prior studies.

For practitioners, the findings help organizations to improve the performance of their employees and to design a more effective environment for employee monitoring.

A research model was proposed to study the impacts of CPM on employee monitoring, after a broad survey on related researches. The validated model and its corresponding study results can be referenced by organization managers and decision makers to make favorable tactics for achieving their goals of implementing employee monitoring.

The purpose of this paper is to facilitate understanding of how to mitigate the privacy concerns of users who have experienced privacy invasions.

Drawing on the communication privacy management theory, the authors developed a model suggesting that privacy concerns form through a cognitive process involving threat-coping appraisals, institutional privacy assurances and privacy experiences. The model was tested using data from an empirical survey with 913 randomly selected social media users.

Privacy concerns are jointly determined by perceived privacy risks and privacy self-efficacy. The perceived effectiveness of institutional privacy assurances in terms of established privacy policies and privacy protection technology influences the perceptions of privacy risks and privacy self-efficacy. More specifically, privacy invasion experiences are negatively associated with the perceived effectiveness of institutional privacy assurances.

Privacy concerns are conceptualized as general concerns that reflect an individual’s worry about the possible loss of private information. The specific types of private information were not differentiated.

This paper is among the first to clarify the specific mechanisms through which privacy invasion experiences influence privacy concerns. Privacy concerns have long been viewed as resulting from individual actions. The study contributes to literature by linking privacy concerns with institutional privacy practice.

This paper aims to investigate behavioural changes related to self-censorship (SC) in social networking sites (SNSs) as new methods of online surveillance are introduced. In particular, it examines the relationships between SC and four related factors: privacy concerns (PC), privacy awareness (PA), perceived vulnerability (PV) and information management (IM).

A national wide survey was conducted in the UK (N = 519). The data were analysed to present both descriptive and inferential statistical findings.

The level of online SC increases as the level of privacy concern increases. The level of privacy concern increases as the levels of PA and PV increase and the level of effective IM decreases.

This study extends the literature on online SC, showing that PCs increase the level of SC in SNSs. It provides support for three antecedent factors to PC which impact upon levels of SC when communicating in SNSs.

The advancement of enterprise social networks (ESNs) facilitates information sharing but also presents the challenge of managing information boundaries. This study aims to explore the factors that influence the information-control behavior of ESN users when continuously sharing information.

This study specifies the information-control behaviors in the “wall posts” channel and applies communication privacy management (CPM) theory to analyze the effects of the individual-specific factor (disposition to value information), context-specific factors (work-relatedness and information richness) and risk-benefit ratio (public benefit and public risk). Data on actual information-control behaviors extracted from ESN logs are examined using multilevel mixed-effects logistic regression analysis.

The study's findings show the direct effects of the individual-specific factor, context-specific factors and risk-benefit ratio, highlighting interactions between the individual motivation factor and ESN context factors.

This study reshapes the relationship of CPM theory boundary rules in the ESN context, extending information-control research and providing insights into ESNs' information-control practices.