Expanding the concept of privacy towards ensuring the appropriate flows of personal information, Nissenbau suggests consider privacy as a form of contextual integrity. This framework intends to be a sort of guideline on how to approach the co-presence of values and interests, in relation to privacy expectations. According to Nissenbaum, contextual privacy is ‘preserved when informational norms are respected and violated when informational norms are breached [...] whether or not control is appropriate depends on the context, the types of information, the subject, sender, and recipient’. The concept of contextual integrity helps to understand that privacy plays different roles in different contexts and that it follows different dynamics for different relations, such as corporations-users or users-users. Privacy protection does not only translate into the indiscriminate control of users’ data and metadata, but it is rather also related to the various practices of information sharing depending on different social media contexts. The information that a user shares on Facebook or Tumbler is unlikely to be shared on LinkedIn and vice versa (though of course it is always possible).
The use of social media, in fact, erodes the traditional notion of privacy bringing into discussion the coexistence of personal protection and interest in self-disclosure. Building on Nissenbaum’s idea of managing information according to different contexts (contextual privacy), privacy is interpreted more as people’s control over personal circles of intimacy. When the notions of intimate and private are considered alongside social media, the oxymoron of privacy manifests. In fact, the main purpose of participating in social practices online is the mutual sharing of information and the management of personal social networks. Regarding this, Debatin described the presence of two dimensions of privacy risks on social media: horizontal axis and vertical axis, which respectively denote the risks represented by social interactions among users (horizontal) and risks represented by the collection and use of data by networking companies (vertical). In order to face potential privacy risks, Debatin suggests to use the voluntary ethical self-regulation of privacy through which users limit the visibility of personal data. The existing paradox of protecting and disclosing personal data demonstrates how social media alters how people value and conceive of privacy.
Paradox of Self-Violation of Privacy on Internet
