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Negotiating Privacy Concerns and Social Capital Needs in a Social Media Environment

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Abstract

Social network sites (SNSs) are becoming an increasingly popular resource for both students and adults, who use them to connect with and maintain relationships with a variety of ties. For many, the primary function of these sites is to consume and distribute personal content about the self. Privacy concerns around sharing information in a public or semi-public space are amplified by SNSs’ structural characteristics, which may obfuscate the true audience of these disclosures due to their technical properties (e.g., persistence, searchability) and dynamics of use (e.g., invisible audiences, context collapse) (boyd 2008b). Early work on the topic focused on the privacy pitfalls of Facebook and other SNSs (e.g., Acquisti and Gross 2006; Barnes 2006; Gross and Acquisti 2005) and argued that individuals were (perhaps inadvertently) disclosing information that might be inappropriate for some audiences, such as future employers, or that might enable identity theft or other negative outcomes.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

    Nicole B. Ellison, Jessica Vitak, Charles Steinfield, Rebecca Gray & Cliff Lampe

Authors
  1. Nicole B. Ellison
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  2. Jessica Vitak
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  3. Charles Steinfield
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  4. Rebecca Gray
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  5. Cliff Lampe
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Nicole B. Ellison .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. , Fachbereich Psychologie, Universität Hamburg, Von-Melle-Park 5, Hamburg, 20146, Germany

    Sabine Trepte

  2. , Fachbereich Psychologie, Universität Hamburg, Von-Melle-Park 5, Hamburg, 20146, Germany

    Leonard Reinecke

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Ellison, N.B., Vitak, J., Steinfield, C., Gray, R., Lampe, C. (2011). Negotiating Privacy Concerns and Social Capital Needs in a Social Media Environment. In: Trepte, S., Reinecke, L. (eds) Privacy Online. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21521-6_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21521-6_3

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-21520-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-21521-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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