ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we discuss the concept of privacy cynicism as a cognitive coping mechanism to the complex privacy landscape users are confronted with within digital societies. We situate the development of the concept within the privacy paradox and privacy calculus literature, offer a definition, and explain its four dimensions (mistrust, powerlessness, uncertainty, and resignation). Since privacy cynicism is adjacent but distinct from recently introduced concepts, we contrast it with privacy apathy (Hargittai & Marwick, 2016), surveillance realism (Dencik & Cable, 2017), privacy fatigue (Choi et al., 2018), and privacy helplessness (Cho, 2021). We follow this discussion with a contextualization of privacy cynicism within existing constraints that reduce user agency and foster privacy cynicism. The chapter concludes with a forward-looking agenda for future research on the topic that includes conceptual clarifications, the identification of salient antecedents and outcomes, contextually situated and comparative work, as well as studies into how to best address privacy cynicism from a top-down policy perspective or a bottom-up resistance and repair perspective.
