ABSTRACT
Individualistic privacy approaches have dominated the field of privacy for decades and continue to be a keystone for understanding how people manage privacy offline and online. Some of their assumptions have been recently questioned, however, in light of social media practices for sharing and transferring personal information. In order to understand what is still tenable and what needs to be revisited and redrawn, we seek to establish in this chapter the core assumptions of individualistic privacy approaches and how they are embedded in privacy research. In particular, we discuss the role of control, agency, and bounded rationality in privacy management, with a special focus on what we call situationally bounded privacy and hyper-ambivalent spaces of social media. We also review some of the foundational theories, as well as emergent directions and recent extensions in individualistic privacy research. By reflecting critically on the assumptions, theoretical frameworks, and emergent research extensions, our goal is to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of privacy in social media.
