Responses to Privacy Turbulence: The Impact of Personality Traits on Recalibration and Privacy Boundaries on Facebook
Abstract
As individuals use social media to create and maintain relationships and connections, they must also decide how to manage the private information that they disclose to their connections. If private information is handled improperly online, it may evoke varying responses that affect previously held privacy boundaries. Using communication privacy management theory (Petronio, 2002) as a framework, this study seeks to understand how the severity of a privacy violation impacts the Facebook users respond to online privacy turbulence. It also investigates how personality characteristics influence these responses. Results reveal that more severe privacy violations are met with more discussion of the privacy violation and thicker privacy boundaries both between the owner and the violator and between the owner and their social media network. Findings also imply that some of the Big Five personality traits impact the relationship between severity and the outcome variables.