"Your Privacy is Your Responsibility": Understanding How Users Collectively Navigate the Complexity of Privacy on Quora

TL;DR

This study explores how Quora users collectively discuss privacy issues, revealing diverse topics and factors influencing privacy attitudes, and suggests community-based tools to enhance collective privacy management.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of user-generated privacy discussions on Quora, highlighting the interplay of various factors and proposing community-oriented privacy support tools.

Findings

Diverse privacy topics discussed by users

Interplay of individual, technological, and societal factors

Implications for community-based privacy tools

Abstract

In the current technology environment, users are often in a vulnerable position when it comes to protecting their privacy. Previous efforts to promote privacy protection have largely focused on top-down approaches such as regulation and technology design, missing opportunities to understand how to empower users through bottom-up, collective approaches. Our paper addresses this by analyzing what and how privacy-related topics are discussed on Quora. We identified a wide range of interconnected privacy topics brought up by the users, including privacy risks and dangers, protection strategies, organizational practices, and existing laws and regulations. Our results highlight the interplay among the individual, technological, organizational, and societal factors affecting users' privacy attitudes. Moreover, we provide implications for designing community-based tools to better support users' collective efforts in navigating privacy, tools that incorporate users' diverse privacy-related behaviors and preferences, simplify information access and sharing, and connect designers and developers with the user community.