Examining Co-Owners’ Privacy Consideration in Collaborative Photo Sharing

Abstract

Researchers have investigated how collaborative photo sharing, in which users (owners) share photos on social media that reveal other users’ (co-owners) information, can violate the co-owner’s privacy and how contextual factors, such as photo content and audience, can influence the co-owner’s privacy concerns and decisions. However, it is unclear how the contextual factors interact with each other. Since co-owners’ privacy attitudes are often influenced by multiple contextual factors at the same time, it is possible that the impact of one factor depends on the other factors. Through an interview and survey study with WeChat users in China, we found significant interaction effects among the contextual factors in collaborative photo sharing. The impact of one factor on co-owners’ concerns is dependent on another factor. We suggest a more holistic evaluation of contextual factors and discuss how our findings contribute to the understanding of contextual integrity framework. We also provide implications for future privacy design for collaborative photo-sharing on social media.