Privacy as Social Norm: Systematically Reducing Dysfunctional Privacy Concerns on Social Media

TL;DR

This paper addresses the problem of dysfunctional privacy fear among teens on social media. It employs a two-stage mixed-methods approach with $N=19$ co-design interviews and $N=136$ design-evaluation participants to identify fear sources and derive ten empowering privacy designs. The study provides empirical evidence of dysfunctional fear, outlines design principles, and proposes a platform-level privacy agenda to normalize protective norms and reduce unnecessary anxiety. Practically, the findings suggest that platforms can mitigate teen fear by integrating explicit privacy norms, low-burden controls, and follow-up mechanisms that operate independently of peer behavior.

Abstract

Through co-design interviews ($N=19$) and a design evaluation survey (N=136) with U.S. teens ages 13-18, we investigated teens' privacy management on social media. Our study revealed that 28% of teens with public accounts and 15% with private accounts experience "dysfunctional fear," that is, fear that diminishes their quality of life or paralyzes them from taking necessary precautions. These fears fall into three categories: fear of uncontrolled audience reach, fear of online hostility, and fear of personal privacy missteps. While current approaches often emphasize individual vigilance and restrictive measures, our findings show this can paradoxically lead teens to either withdraw from beneficial social interactions or resign themselves to accept privacy violations, viewing them as inevitable. Drawing on teen input, we developed and evaluated ten design prototypes that emphasize empowerment over fear, system-wide explicit emphasis on privacy, clear privacy norms, and flexible controls. Survey results indicate teens perceive these approaches as effectively reducing privacy concerns while preserving social benefits. Our findings suggest that platforms will be more likely to protect teens' privacy and less likely to manufacture unnecessary fear if they include designs that minimize the impact on other users, have low trade-offs with existing features, require minimal user effort, and function independently of community behavior. Such designs include: 1) alerting users about potentially unintentional personal information disclosure and 2) following up on user reports.

Figures (3)

• Figure 1: Sample screens of prototypes of the ten design approaches derived from the co-design study with teen participants. Survey respondents were provided additional screens for clarity. A complete taxonomy of the designs is available in Table \ref{['tab:features']}.
• Figure 2: Bar graphs illustrating the mean rating (N=136; 72 responses from private account owners and 64 from public account owners; a total of 118 participants responded) of the ten design prototypes in the design evaluation survey. Each bar illustrates the mean rating of participants' responses to the questions, with standard error bars. The significance levels of the one-sample t-tests against the hypothesis that the mean rating is a neutral score are denoted using asterisks over the bar, where one asterisk denotes $p<.05$, two asterisks denote $p<.01$, and three asterisks denote $p<.001$.
• Figure 3: A diverging bar graph illustrates the ratings (N=136) for responses to the question, "How would the features affect your [specific concern]?" Although we initially identified seven categories of concern, we subdivided the fear related to "imaginary audiences" and "boundary violations" into two separate categories and added a category for vague fears, thereby totaling ten distinct types of concern.