ABSTRACT
Privacy is not unequivocally defined, fortunately. A plethora of definitions for one term usually means that a field is vibrant, advancing, and not owned by a handful of scholars, but rather studied by people from different disciplines and with different viewpoints. All of this applies to a term we consider one of the most interesting of our time: Privacy. In this chapter, we review definitions that are broad enough for theorizing and replication studies and sufficiently complex to capture the complexity of social media use. In the core of the chapter, we review the most popular definitions, discussing how the field has struggled to interweave seminal privacy definitions with the fluctuating, relational, and communicative nature of social media users’ privacy experiences. Our goal is to provide an overview and food for thought for scholars and practitioners seeking to decide on a definition of privacy that best captures the social media practice they seek to describe.
