ABSTRACT
Online users often express grave concerns about their privacy, yet exhibit free-wheeling behaviors and self-disclosures on social media sites. This discrepancy between attitudes and behaviors (referred to as a “privacy paradox”) may arise from having too little time and cognitive resources to process privacy considerations in a systematic way. To cope with information overload, online users often make privacy decisions based on contextual cues on social media, which tend to over-emphasize potential benefits and downplay potential risks of self-disclosure. For instance, cues in the form of metrics on the interface, such as the number of other employees in a person's organization who have enrolled in LinkedIn by disclosing their personal information, can trigger the bandwagon heuristic (“if disclosing information is good for so many others, it's good for me, too”). Drawing from a decade of research on online privacy, we provide an overview of privacy heuristics, organizing the discussion by considering the benefits and risks of information disclosure. This body of work sheds light on how users make privacy decisions on social media and explains why phenomena such as “privacy paradox” sometimes exist while sometimes not. Our goal is to promote more informed privacy decisions among users with the help of better designs and literacy campaigns.
