Privacy Salience: Taxonomies and Research Opportunities

Abstract

Privacy is a well-understood concept in the physical world, with us all desiring some escape from the public gaze. However, while individuals might recognise locking doors as protecting privacy, they have difficulty practising equivalent actions online. Privacy salience considers the tangibility of this important principle; one which is often obscured in digital environments. Through extensively surveying a range of studies, we construct the first taxonomies of privacy salience. After coding articles and identifying commonalities, we categorise works by their methodologies, platforms and underlying themes. While web browsing appears to be frequently analysed, the Internet-of-Things has received little attention. Through our use of category tuples and frequency matrices, we then explore those research opportunities which might have been overlooked. These include studies of targeted advertising and its affect on salience in social networks. It is through refining our understanding of this important topic that we can better highlight the subject of privacy.

(Smart)Watch Out! encouraging privacy-protective behavior through interactive games

“…Concerns. Although data protection is an important topic, it often lacks salience (Williams et al, 2016a). By highlighting the risks of wearable devices, privacy threats might appear more tangible.…”

“Everything under control?”: Privacy control salience influences both critical processing and perceived persuasiveness of targeted advertising among adolescents

“…As asserted by Xu et al (2012), more inquiries are needed to clarify the role of control in the information privacy literature. Recently, Williams et al (2016) specifically called for studies that investigate the relationship between privacy control salience and consumer responses toward targeted advertising on online platforms. As a response to these calls, the present findings shed a theoretical light on the role of privacy control and two underlying mechanisms in explaining not only consumer responses, but also critical information processing among adolescents.…”

“…Privacy control salience can be defined as the degree to which privacy control is prominent in a person's awareness during interaction with a SNS (Williams, Nurse, & Creese, 2016). As argued by scholars, the phenomenon of privacy control salience and its particular role in evaluating targeted advertisements needs further investigation (Bonneau & Preibusch, 2010;Williams et al, 2016). This will be discussed in the next sections.…”