Privacy Literacy and the Everyday Use of Social Technologies

Abstract

The increased privacy concerns and risks associated with the misuse of personal information collected, processed and re-purposed from various digital technologies calls for users’ understanding of their own informational privacy. While regulatory and technical mechanisms exist to protect individuals’ information privacy, these approaches have failed to be effective. This study presents the case for privacy literacy from an information literacy perspective as a complementary mechanism to the existing approaches to protecting individuals’ information privacy. The research used a constructivist paradigm, through interviewing twenty-one participants, and through online observation of SNS (social network services), and a privacy-settings walkthrough specifically on Facebook, and asking participants to track their online footprints and talk about any personal information found online.