Exploring the relationship between user's intention to manage privacy in OSN and the factors of communication under distress

Abstract

Understanding and analyzing privacy is a challenging task in that interpretations of privacy involve investigating complex social relationships in many different social occasions. In online social networks (OSNs), user experience of privacy also is deeply related to who sends what message to whom through what kind of interaction mechanism. In this paper, we interpret the idea of privacy management in the context of communication under distress in terms of emotions, cognitions, and beliefs. Communication privacy management theory was examined for establishing and modeling relationship between the context and users’ behavior of managing their privacy in OSNs. A user survey was conducted using a comprehensive set of questions measuring salient research constructs. Through a set of analytical techniques of dimension reduction and causal modeling, we built a causal model. Our interpretation of distressful context resulted in a set of research constructs with strong prediction; unwillingness to communicate, willingness to communicate, active self-disclosure, and passive self-disclosure. This paper will make contributions in two folds offering; 1) a quantitative interpretation of context criteria in communication privacy management theory, and 2) better understanding of OSN users’ behavior in regards to managing their privacy.