Inside Out or Not: Privacy Implications of Emotional Disclosure

TL;DR

The paper addresses how momentary emotions, shaped by time and urban context, influence individuals' location-sharing decisions. It combines emotion elicitation via film clips with urban-context scenarios, collectSAM ratings, and wrist-worn EDA to capture subjective and physiological responses. The study finds that self-reported emotions affect sharing to distant social groups and that neutral emotions reduce precision with close circles, with wrist-based physiological signals aligning with these patterns. These findings motivate emotion-aware privacy controls to mitigate oversharing and enhance user privacy in digital environments.

Abstract

Privacy is dynamic, sensitive, and contextual, much like our emotions. Previous studies have explored the interplay between privacy and context, privacy and emotion, and emotion and context. However, there remains a significant gap in understanding the interplay of these aspects simultaneously. In this paper, we present a preliminary study investigating the role of emotions in driving individuals' information sharing behaviour, particularly in relation to urban locations and social ties. We adopt a novel methodology that integrates context (location and time), emotion, and personal information sharing behaviour, providing a comprehensive analysis of how contextual emotions affect privacy. The emotions are assessed with both self-reporting and electrodermal activity (EDA). Our findings reveal that self-reported emotions influence personal information-sharing behaviour with distant social groups, while neutral emotions lead individuals to share less precise information with close social circles, a pattern is potentially detectable with wrist-worn EDA. Our study helps lay the foundation for personalised emotion-aware strategies to mitigate oversharing risks and enhance user privacy in the digital age.

Figures (8)

• Figure 1: Experiment Procedure. The sequences on the top depict the steps taken for each part, whereas parts 1-5 and 6-11 correspond to the movie clips and urban clips. Part 1 is always the neutral clip. The rest of the videos in both sections are presented randomly.
• Figure 2: Snapshots of the six urban clips.
• Figure 3: Self-reported privacy attitude for each of the five items. *GIPC and PPR are reversely coded.
• Figure 4: Pearson Correlation between privacy attitudes and the tendency of sharing location information to different recipient groups.
• Figure 5: Self-reported SAM ratings for the six urban clips.