Revista Latina de Comunicación Social # 071 – Pages 715 to 729 Research | DOI: 10.4185/RLCS-2016-1117en | ISSN 1138-5820 | Year 2016 How to cite this article in bibliographies / References T Moreno-Becerra, C Gajardo-León, E Parra-Ortiz (2016): “Privacy: how it is understood and managed on Facebook. A case study of young Chileans”. Revista Latina de Comunicación Social, 71, pp. 715 to 729. http://www.revistalatinacs.org/071/paper/1117/37en.html DOI: 10.4185/RLCS-2016-1117en Privacy: how it is understood and managed on Facebook. A case study of young Chileans Tabita Moreno-Becerra [CV] [ ORCID] Assistant Professor of Social Communication Department - Universidad de Concepción, Chile - [email protected] Constanza Gajardo-León [CV] [ ORCID] Assistant Professor of Social Communication Department - Universidad de Concepción, Chile - [email protected] Elizabeth Parra-Ortiz [CV] Associate Professor of Social Communication Department - Universidad de Concepción, Chile - [email protected] Abstracts Introduction. Facebook users continuously share varied information, including personal data and their physical locations. These practices alter the concept of privacy because data remains available to contacts, while many times it is also of public access. Methodology. This article analyzes how young adults (25-34 years old) from Chile conciliate the broadcasting of personal information through Facebook while taking care of their privacy. Through a case study, 20 young adults of Concepción were in-depth interviewed. Results and conclusions. The findings show that young adults carefully select the information that will be shared with their contacts, and adopt different strategies to protect their personal information and define who will be able to access specific contents. Concordantly and given a sense of control they consider to have over the information they share, these young adults do not perceive any threat to their social privacy (social surveillance), but they are mistrustful and feel their institutional privacy (institutional surveillance) is threatened. Keywords Facebook; privacy; sense of control; personal data; social media. http://www.revistalatinacs.org/071/paper/1117/37en.html Página 715 Revista Latina de Comunicación Social # 071 – Pages 715 to 729 Research | DOI: 10.4185/RLCS-2016-1117en | ISSN 1138-5820 | Year 2016 Contents 1. Introduction. 2. Facebook: General background 3. The concept of privacy. 4. Method. 5. Results. 5.1 How privacy is understood. 5.2. Self-presentation and privacy. 5.3. How privacy is managed. 6. Discussion and conclusions Traslation by Tabita Moreno-Becerra (Dra. en Comunicación, Retórica y Medios Digitales – Universidad de Concepción, Chile) 1. Introduction Social media are one of the most used Internet services worldwide (Boyd, 2008; Boyd & Ellison, 2007; Ellison, Steinfield & Lampe, 2007). Understood as those “tools, services and applications that allow people to interact with others, using network technologies” (Boyd, 2008, p. 92), these services are also used on the move because of their accessibility through mobile devices (Humphreys, 2013). Precisely, mobile communication technologies, such as smart phones and tablets, have introduced a “mobile logic” (Ling & Donner, 2009) into individuals’ social interactions because they keep expectations of unending availability, no matter their physical location. These expectations of constant availability have produced new practices among young people. They daily keep in touch and share content in a continuous process of updating social media profiles and interacting with physically close and distant others, while moving through different spaces and places of their daily lives. The broadcasted information will remain available to their social media contacts and, at the same time, it will be recorded by diverse databases. In the particular case of Chile, the country is in the fourth place among emergent nations (Pew Research Center, 2014), regarding the use of mobile Internet. Moreover, the use of social media, with a monthly average of 5.3 hours per visitor, stands out among Internet-based activities. In fact, over a third of Chilean population maintains a social media profile (Daie, 2012, 2013, 2014), with Facebook particularly captivating users’ preferences, as it accounts for 94% of the total hours spent connected to those services (Daie, 2013). This shows how much of the overall social media use, and Facebook in particular, now takes place on the move through mobile devices and integrated into the dynamic physical and social contexts of everyday life (Vladar & Fife, 2010; Plew, 2009; Urista et al., 2008; Hargittai, 2008). Continuously updating social media profiles with a variety of information, from basic personal data to the physical location of users, alters the concept of privacy and it raises new questions regarding individuals’ institutional and social privacy. As Raynes-Goldie (2010) establishes, institutional privacy refers to the information that different institutions record through diverse databases, whose aim is developing a person’s profile as finished as possible. This profile, which gets increasingly accurate, enables these institutions to modify advertising offers according to every user’s particular interests, as it does nowadays on Facebook. The term social privacy refers to the information that is shared by social media users themselves http://www.revistalatinacs.org/071/paper/1117/37en.html Página 716 Revista Latina de Comunicación Social # 071 – Pages 715 to 729 Research | DOI: 10.4185/RLCS-2016-1117en | ISSN 1138-5820 | Year 2016 among their social ties, which has been facilitated with the use of mobile platforms and continuous access to different social media. Although research on social media is extensive within developed countries, in Chile it is rather scarce. This research has been focused on statistics of diffusion and access (Daie, 2014) or the incidence of these services use in political participation, especially among young people (Valenzuela, Arriagada & Scherman, 2012; Valenzuela, Arriagada & Scherman, 2014). Therefore, it is a pending debt to analyze how these new scenarios of technological convergence play a role in the ways that people understand, manage and take care of their privacy. All while considering how, as H flich (2006) claims, “The private, even the intimate, is exposed to the full gaze of the public eye” (p. 59). Consequently, the present article accounts for how young Facebook users in Chile reconcile their behavior of broadcasting personal information through this medium, as they strive to take care of their privacy. The first section of this article frames the study within a Chilean context, including Facebook’s background and its use in Chile, as well as the theoretical framework for the concept of privacy. Then, the methodology used in this study is detailed, and is followed by the discussion about the main findings and how they connect with the existing literature. Finally, this article concludes that Facebook users, those who participate in this study, take care of their privacy and are aware of the social and institutional surveillance that they are exposed to, consequently adopting different strategies in order to protect what they consider personal information. 2. Facebook: General background Facebook currently has more than a billion active users around the world (Facebook, 2016). In the case of the United States, more than a half of its population (52%) uses two or more social media, but Facebook continues being people’s preference (Duggan, Ellison, Lampe, Lenhart & Madden, 2015). The same trend is seen in Chile, where 93% of Internet users keep a social media profile, with Facebook leading users’ preferences (Daie, 2014). For example, 86% of those between 18 and 29 years old are registered on this social media (Universidad Diego Portales, 2011). In regard to Chile, Facebook’s massive wide spreading happened during 2008. This was clearly noticeable when in only six months the number of connected users grew by more than 2 thousand percent, going from 106 thousand 960 users in February of 2008, to 2 million 456 thousand 480 in July of the same year. Currently, and according to Facebook data (2016), Chile has 10 million active users per month, and 76% of them connect daily to this platform. With this being said, Chile is one of the countries with the most active Facebook users in Latin America. In such a context, Chilean people, whose list of contacts average 325 friends, share huge loads of information through Facebook everyday. Even though this service, created in 2004 by a group of Harvard University’s students lead by Mark Zuckerberg, declares that its mission is giving power to people to share and create a more open and connected world (Facebook, 2016), users’ perception on the protection that the company has over their data has become a complex issue to the company’s http://www.revistalatinacs.org/071/paper/1117/37en.html Página 717 Revista Latina de Comunicación Social # 071 – Pages 715 to 729 Research | DOI: 10.4185/RLCS-2016-1117en | ISSN 1138-5820 | Year 2016 image. This is because today’s users question the treatment and security of personal information that they share across this platform (Rogers, 2012). Privacy care has become very important, since the use of social media has increased the volume of information that users share over the Internet. Precisely, given the amount and type of information that people post every day, it has been argued that they do not care about their privacy. In this regarding, one of the concepts that has marked earlier researches about social media privacy is the notion of privacy paradox (Barnes, 2006), which refers to the discrepancies between people’s interests in their privacy and their actual behaviors adopted in its care, which means that although users are concerned about their privacy, they make minimal efforts (even null) in order to protect their personal information. Based on this perspective, Acquisti y Gross (2006) indicate that although most users express concern about their privacy in general, they are unaware of their privacy on Facebook and, in some cases, they are simply unaware of their information visibility on this social medium.