Privacy in the context of reciprocity: conceptualizing users’ choices
| Published date | 11 November 2019 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-05-2018-0171 |
| Date | 11 November 2019 |
| Pages | 1316-1333 |
| Author | Ashraf Khalil,Huma Zia,Salam Abdallah |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Bibliometrics,Databases,Information & knowledge management,Information & communications technology,Internet,Records management & preservation,Document management |
Privacy in the context of
reciprocity: conceptualizing
users’choices
Ashraf Khalil and Huma Zia
Department of Computer Science and Information Technology,
Abu Dhabi University, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, and
Salam Abdallah
College of Business,
Abu Dhabi University, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of reciprocity in privacy settings on the
compromises and losses in utility encountered by users. The authors base our study on WhatsApp because of
the inherent reciprocity in its privacy settings to understand users’preferences and reasoning in choosing a
particular setting in light of its reciprocal consequence.
Design/methodology/approach –The authors present a qualitative study whereby we conducted a series
of in-depth interviews with 15 individuals, representing a range of ages, nationalities, work experience and
WhatsApp usage frequency. The interviews were semi-structured and thematic analysis was employed.
Findings –The results showed that reciprocity has a strong influence on privacy choices, and users over
time adjusted their settings continuously in various ways to balance the overall utility of the application and
their privacy. Type of contacts, usage frequency and underlying intent in using the application significantly
impact privacy choices.
Practical implications –The findings recommend improved design for Mobile Instant Messaging that
enables flexible privacy configurations that can be controlled separately for different groups and for
individual contacts.
Originality/value –The paper provides original insights into how reciprocity affects the utility of the
application and the privacy choices of the users. The investigation is unique in that the authors know of no
other study that looked into the notion of reciprocity and how it affects users’privacy choices and preferences
when built in to Mobile Instant Messaging applications. Overall, the authors believe that this paper adds
significantly to a growing body of research on privacy and social media.
Keywords Information sharing, Privacy, Social media, Mobile instant messaging
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Online networking and messaging sites allow users to share or hide their profile and
presence information with other users. While a natural inclination exists to hide such
personal information for privacy reasons, sharing it enables improved coordination and
improved communication for others (Rashidi et al., 2016; Staddon, 2009). To address the
apprehensions of users, applications provide options in privacy settings to control and
manage the visibility of a user’s private information (Rashidi et al., 2016). Hence, people
either opt to preserve their private information (e.g. location obfuscation in foursquare and
Facebook or selecting what others see when you view another’s profile in LinkedIn), select a
specified audience for their posts according to the content of the information (e.g. Facebook)
or altogether elect to disable certain information (e.g. “last seen online”time in WhatsApp).
These privacy choices, however, consequently reduce the utility of certain applications, such
Online Information Review
Vol. 43 No. 7, 2019
pp. 1316-1333
© Emerald PublishingLimited
1468-4527
DOI 10.1108/OIR-05-2018-0171
Received 15 May 2018
Revised 7 October 2018
2 March 2019
Accepted 17 May 2019
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/1468-4527.htm
The authors share co-first authorship. This study was supported in part from Seungwon Yang’s
National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1620451 and Brenton Stewart’s Russell Long
Professorship in the School of Library & Information Science, Louisiana State University.
1316
OIR
43,7
as LinkedIn and WhatsApp, due to an interesting feature of reciprocity; hence, we can say
that a user trades-off utility for the sake of preserving personal information or vice versa.
WhatsApp allows users to display or hide their online status, unlike SMS. For example,
one can see when a person is online and even typing a message, whether they read the sent
messages, and when they last accessed the application (Church and de Oliveira, 2013).
Settings are provided to control only “last seen online”(LSO) time disclosure and read
receipts (RR) (Pielot et al., 2014). Users are offered the option of selecting an audience for
LSO time, including “everyone,”“contacts”or “nobody,”as shown in Figure 1(a). Selecting a
particular option fundamentally triggers an automatic reciprocal response, e.g. if one opts
for “nobody,”then the user can also no longer view the LSO time of any contact.
Furthermore, if a user selects “contacts”for divulging his/her LSO time, then his/her
contact’s LSO time would also be visible, unless that contact has changed his or her setting
to “nobody.”Similar policy applies to selecting the option of “everyone.”
The same principle applies to the RR setting in WhatsApp. The RR setting indicates
whether the sent message has been read by the recipient or not. Read messages are
indicated by blue checkmarks. Figure 1(b) shows the privacy options for RR setting.
The user can turn off the RR setting if s/he does not want the sender to know whether the
received message has been read. However, by turning this setting off, the user will also not
know whether or when his/her sent messages are read by their recipients. In these cases,
privacy gained equals utility lost. In this study, we refer to this mechanism as the Principle
of Reciprocity (PoR).
The concept of reciprocity is derived from societal standards that make it an obligation
for individuals to return favors or gifts similar to those received (Kizilcec et al., 2018). Studies
have shown that individuals tend to show a higher rate of cooperation in a “tit-for-tat”
situation (Parks and Rumble, 2001). Ample research has considered cultural variations
of reciprocity. A study found that both Americans and Indians consider the concept of
returning a favor a social expectation (Miller et al., 2017). Reciprocation of actions also
subsequently leads to self-satisfaction and, in some cases, comes out of altruistic intentions
(Miller et al., 2017). It can, therefore, be deduced that reciprocation is common amongst most
cultures. This principle of returning a favor has been applied by WhatsApp designers in the
privacy settings, the influence and impact of which are explored in this paper. Reciprocity
can be found in various aspects of phone use as well. For instance, upon downloading an
(a)
Notes: (a) LSO time; (b) read receipts
(b)
Figure 1.
Privacy options
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Privacy in the
context of
reciprocity
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