Young women’s perceptions of cooperative privacy threats through the lens of abortion in the United States

Abstract

Privacy scholars have posited that institutional privacy threats arouse more uncertainty than social privacy threats, though research examining different types of privacy threats side-by-side is limited. This research uses the repeal of federal protection for abortion in the United States as a case study to explore reactions to these different threats. Moreover, by separately considering corporations and the state, we inductively examine beliefs about the flows of information and resulting power dynamics between individuals (horizontal) and multiple institutions (vertical). Data from interviews with 45 young women in California and Indiana revealed that privacy threats from institutions—especially the state—were perceived as more uncertain, and that these various threats were seen as intertwined. We present the construct of cooperative privacy threats to highlight the lack of boundaries between privacy threats, which often amplifies the risks they pose. Our findings elaborate on online privacy theory and may inform future privacy-preserving policy and technology design.

Affiliated Institutions

• University of California, Santa Barbara US

Related Publications