How teens negotiate privacy on social media proactively and reactively

Abstract

Privacy management can be dichotomized into proactive and reactive behaviors. The former indicates avoiding information leakage beforehand. The latter occurs in the form of recovery efforts and it thus involves interpersonal dynamics. Past studies often focus on proactive privacy management without taking social interaction into account. The current study adopts coping and threat appraisal in the Protection Motivation Theory to compare the factors related to distinct types of privacy management with a stratified sample of teenagers in Taiwan (N = 1956). Controlling the pattern of social networking site use, the empirical results highlight the necessity of differentiating the privacy management. In addition, self-efficacy interacted with perceived vulnerability. Teenagers might ignore their vulnerability perceptions when they perceive themselves as having inferior self-efficacy, constituting disengagement from privacy protection. While it is never easy to prevent privacy breaches, suggestions for instructional designs are made on the basis of the behavioral types and empirical results.