Taste for Privacy: How Context, Identity, and Lived-Experience Shape Information Sharing Preferences

TL;DR

This study reveals how privacy preferences among college students vary with context, identity, and lived experiences, emphasizing the need for adaptive privacy settings over fixed consent models.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence of shifting privacy behaviors, highlights the influence of trust and vulnerability, and advocates for context-aware data governance.

Findings

Privacy settings have shifted towards more private accounts over time.

Discomfort sharing PII predicts privacy settings across platforms.

Vulnerable groups show higher discomfort with institutions of power.

Abstract

Privacy preferences are not fixed individual traits, they depend on context and lived experiences. In this study, we analyze 2,912 survey responses from 782 college students collected over seven survey periods during 2023 and 2024. We ask about their usage of social media, the security settings of their accounts, and measure their comfort in sharing personally identifiable information (PII) across 17 different institutional contexts. Compared to past research, we observe a large shift towards private accounts, going from 1/3rd private in 2007 to 2/3rds in 2024, and find that participants' discomfort sharing PII with social media platforms strongly predicts their privacy settings. Beyond social media, we identify a stable ranking of institutional trust, though some institutions, like the police, show high variability reflecting divergent lived experiences. Traditionally marginalized groups and participants having faced adverse childhood experiences show more discomfort with institutions of power, especially in areas where they face greater vulnerability. We argue for context-adaptive privacy settings that recognize institutional relationships and demographic vulnerabilities, moving beyond one-size-fits-all consent frameworks toward contextually appropriate data governance.