The relationship between preference for privacy and social media usage

This paper aims to investigate whether preferences for certain types of privacy predict the frequency and duration of social media usage as well as the moderating role of gender on these relationships.

An e-mail-based survey among the faculty, staff and students of a medium-sized mid-western university is used to gather data regarding preferences for privacy and social media usage. Using 530 respondents, structural equation modeling explores the relationship between the various privacy types, gender and social media usage.

Evidence supports a relationship between four types of privacy preferences and social media usage. A positive relationship exists between frequency of social media usage and a preference for not neighboring. Duration of social media usage shows a negative relationship with preferences for seclusion and reserve, and surprisingly, a positive relationship with a preference for anonymity. Gender moderates the relationship between preference for privacy and social media usage, offering evidence that intimacy, seclusion and reserve predict social media usage for males, while not neighboring and anonymity predict usage for females.

The study extends the privacy literature through investigating differential impacts of privacy preferences. The marketing literature examines privacy as a general concept, without allowing for differences in consumers' preferences for types of privacy. Additionally, the study shows that gender moderates the relationship between preferences for privacy and social media usage. A second contribution is investigating the relevance of a scale, developed in an age without social media, to an era permeated in social media.