Публичное и приватное в профиле социальной сети (в свете теории С. Петронио)

Abstract

A profile on a social network site (SNS) containing the user’s personal information qualifies as both a personal and public space, which raises the problem of delineating, what is private and what is public in this virtual domain. The paper attempts to identify privacy boundaries in the social media environment and the actual ownership of personal information disclosed on users’ profiles. The stated problem is considered through the lens of Communication Privacy Management theory, an influential approach to the study of privacy in the online environment proposed by Sandra Petronio. The terms and concepts of the theory are applied to analyze the peculiarities of privacy management of the user’s personal information on the pages of the social network VKontakte (i.e. in the context of ‘one-to-many’ communication). The peculiarities noted are as follows: the presence of social media administration as a co-owner of the data (i.e. the user is not granted exclusive ownership of their personal information); difficulties with discussing information ownership rules with other social media participants; the presence of such phenomena as ‘online friends’ and ‘the imagined audience’ making it difficult for the user to recognize the composition of their actual audience and set proper privacy boundaries. It is also shown that the social network provides what can only be described as rather vague collective privacy boundaries (if the term privacy is even applicable to the social media environment). All the information shared by the user on the social media profile crosses the personal privacy boundaries and is moved almost uncontrollably to the collective ownership domain. The further theoretical research of privacy management of personal information on social media profiles should aim to critically examine the concept of collective privacy in the digital space and determine the ownership rights of original owners of personal information gone public.