Tobias Dienlin

Control your Facebook

For an effective and responsible communication on social network sites (SNSs) users must decide between withholding and disclosing personal information. For this so-called privacy regulation, users need to have the respective skills-in other words, they need to have online privacy literacy. In this study, we discuss factors that potentially contribute to and result from online privacy literacy. In an online questionnaire with 630 Facebook users, we found that people who spend more time on Facebook and who have changed their privacy settings more frequently reported to have more online privacy literacy. People with more online privacy literacy, in turn, felt more secure on Facebook and implemented more social privacy settings. A mediation analysis showed that time spend on Facebook and experience with privacy regulation did not per se increase safety and privacy behavior directly, stressing the importance of online privacy literacy as a mediator to a safe and privacy-enhancing online behavior. We conclude that Internet experience leads to more online privacy literacy, which fosters a more cautious privacy behavior on SNSs. The more people use SNSs, the more privacy literacy they have.The more people change their privacy settings on SNSs, the more privacy literacy they have.People with more privacy literacy restrict access to their SNS profile more strongly.People with more privacy literacy feel safer when using SNSs.

Online-Privatheitskompetenz und deren Bedeutung für demokratische Gesellschaften

Hersteller setzen beim Design von Informationsund Kommunikationstechnologien bewusst auf intuitive Bedienbarkeit und eine klare Nutzerorientierung: Das Auffinden von Informationen wird mithilfe von Google kinderleicht, das Kommunizieren über Smartphone-Anwendungen unkompliziert und das Einkaufen über Online-Shoppingportale schnell und bequem. Dabei werden jedoch auch personenbezogene Daten gespeichert, analysiert und wirtschaftlich verwertet – allesamt Datensammlungspraktiken, die für die Nutzerinnen und Nutzer selten greifbar sind und die zu kaum wahrnehmbaren, nichtsdestominder aber signifikanten Verletzungen der informationellen Privatheit führen. Die Verbreitung von sozialen Medien, Online-Einkaufsportalen sowie Smartphones ist dabei nur der Anfang einer beispiellosen Entwicklung hin zu einer nahezu umfassenden Digitalisierung. Schon heute drängen vernetzte Autos, SmartTVs und Wearables immer weiter in bisher private Offline-Kontexte vor und auch hier wird die Quantifizierung von Nutzerverhalten urbar gemacht. Neben der indirekten Vermessung unseres Verhaltens und der Auswertung anfallender Metadaten, geben Menschen in vielen Fällen jedoch auch direkt und freiwillig Informationen über sich preis. Unzählige Firmen und Institutionen nutzen die kombinierten Daten für elaborierte Kundenprofile und hochentwickelte Analyseverfahren. Vor diesem Hintergrund verläuft der aktuelle Diskurs zum Schutz der Privatheit vorranging im Sinne eines liberalen Freiheitsverständnisses (Seubert 2016). Demnach wird der Schutz der Privatheit verstanden als individueller Schutz gegenüber Eingriffen durch Dritte (Mitmenschen, wirtschaftliche oder staatliche Akteure). Diese isolierte Perspektive vernachlässigt Online-Privatheitskompetenz und deren Bedeutung für demokratische Gesellschaften

Good News! How Reading Valenced News Articles Influences Positive Distinctiveness and Learning From News

International news articles often compare different countries, favoring one country over another. On the basis of this notion, we hypothesized that when people read international news articles favoring their own country over another, they would afterwards evaluate their country (in-group) better than the other country (out-group) – a tendency referred to as positive distinctiveness in social identity theory (SIT). We further hypothesized that when people read international news articles favoring their own country, they would afterwards have better knowledge of the news articles they read. An experiment with two groups (positive vs. negative articles in terms of participants’ own national identity) was conducted in Germany and the US (total N = 364). We found that when participants read positively valenced news articles, they afterwards showed more positive distinctiveness (e.g., U.S. students believed that the US had a better national educational system than Germany). We also found that when German participants read positively valenced news articles, they demonstrated better knowledge of the articles. This effect was not found in the U.S. sample. Overall, we found support for the notion that social identity mechanisms are relevant when it comes to analyzing the effects of news media.

Understanding the Effects of Personalization as a Privacy Calculus: Analyzing Self-Disclosure Across Health, News, and Commerce Contexts†

The privacy calculus suggests that online self-disclosure is based on a cost–benefit trade-off. However, although companies progressively collect information to offer tailored services, the effect of both personalization and context-dependency on self-disclosure has remained understudied. Building on the privacy calculus, we hypothesized that benefits, privacy costs, and trust would predict online self-disclosure. Moreover, we analyzed the impact of personalization, investigating whether effects would differ for health, news, and commercial websites. Results from an online experiment using a representative Dutch sample (N = 1,131) supported the privacy calculus, revealing that it was stable across contexts. Personalization decreased trust slightly and benefits marginally. Interestingly, these effects were context-dependent: While personalization affected outcomes in news and commerce contexts, no effects emerged in the health context.