CRII: SaTC: Bottom-up psychosocial interventions for interpersonal privacy preservation in social media

People's privacy is violated on popular social media sites every day, with users sharing sensitive photos and information about other people on a massive scale. Many current interventions for reducing the spread of private information on social media are limited to addressing privacy violations that have already occurred, and interventions are typically initiated by corporations.

This project studies the effectiveness of story- and fact-based intervention strategies that can be deployed to users and used by them to promote privacy on social media. The approach attempts to by change users’ attitudes and reduce their sharing of others’ personal photos and information. This project supports safe online behavior by testing ways to increase privacy awareness and improve online decision-making, preventing interpersonal privacy violations on social media.

Emotional and personal narratives are demonstrated sources of influence in health promotion and disease prevention. Such narratives may be important to preventing privacy violations within highly interconnected social networks, where individuals may be both influenced by narratives and, in turn, participate in influencing others within their network.

Employing a mixed-method experimental approach, the project identifies users’ attitudes towards social media intervention strategies. The project establishes the efficacy of user-oriented privacy intervention strategies in altering young people’s privacy attitudes and behavior, leveraging strategies modeled after successes from other disciplines that vary in modality (text, video, or interactive format) and type (fact-based or narrative appeals).

The project also examines the extent to which communication mechanisms on social media platforms (i.e., online comments) are viable entry points for users to participate in privacy preservation. Overall, the project contributes to the overarching goal of cultivating user-based interpersonal privacy preservation on social media to preserve the social and economic benefits of the web.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.