Metaphors as Scaffolds: Spatial, Embodied, Fantastical, and Relational Framings for Youth Usable Privacy Design

TL;DR

This paper explores how different metaphors used in youth privacy interfaces influence their reasoning and behavior, emphasizing metaphor choice as an ethical design decision.

Contribution

It identifies four metaphor types—spatial, embodied, fantastical, relational—and analyzes their impact on youth privacy reasoning and ethical considerations.

Findings

Spatial metaphors reduce cognitive load.

Embodied metaphors facilitate normative negotiation.

Fantastical metaphors increase engagement with controls.

Abstract

Mainstream usable privacy design frames privacy as administrative work -- settings, toggles, consent checkboxes -- abstracted from the relational, contextual, and embodied registers in which youth reason about disclosure. Drawing on a cross-project reading of three prior studies with youth aged 13--24, we examine how the metaphors that scaffold a privacy interaction shape the reasoning young users bring to it. \textit{Spatial} metaphors reduce cognitive load by recruiting intuitions about navigating physical space. \textit{Embodied} metaphors furnish a shared moral vocabulary that makes implicit norms about public and private space negotiable among users. \textit{Fantastical} metaphors recast privacy management as discoverable play, raising engagement with the granular controls that nuanced self-presentation requires. \textit{Relational} metaphors, by contrast, can lead youth past their own stated boundaries when felt intimacy masks institutional data flow, a risk already visible in AI companion products. Metaphor selection, we argue, is best understood as a first-order ethical design decision for youth privacy.