privacy

VENI Grant to Study Behavioral Contagion on Social Media

I am excited to share that I was recently awarded a VENI innovation grant by the Dutch Research Council (Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek; NWO). Building on my previous work on social contagion and social influence on social media (see e.g., this study), I will continue to study how behaviors spread across social network sites. More specifically, I will investigate how norms develop on social media, how they are perceived, and how such perceptions drive… Read More »VENI Grant to Study Behavioral Contagion on Social Media

ICA Preconference on “Comparative Privacy and the Literacies of a Networked Age”

The comparative privacy research network is organizing a preconference before the annual conference of the International Communication Association on May, 25th (9:30 to 17:00). Drawing on previous and ongoing conversations and collaborations, this preconference aims to attend to privacy literacy’s critical comparative nature by bringing together scholars that examine the cultural, political, and otherwise contextualized aspects of privacy literacy. The ultimate goal is to enhance conversation in communication studies about the ways in which systematic comparative cross-cultural… Read More »ICA Preconference on “Comparative Privacy and the Literacies of a Networked Age”

AoIR Satellite Event on Comparing Fuzzy Things

The Comparative Privacy Research Network is organizing a workshop on issues related to comparing fuzzy concepts like love, trust, and privacy across various structural settings (including, but not limited to cultures). Below is the description of the workshop from the CPRN website: Internet researchers often engage in the study of complex, multidimensional, and culturally sensitive ideas. Deploying such concepts in comparative research settings is critically important to knowledge advancement, yet challenging to implement in practice. This workshop… Read More »AoIR Satellite Event on Comparing Fuzzy Things

New Publication: Can online privacy literacy support informational self-determination?

Current debates on online privacy are often rooted in liberal theory. Privacy is hence often understood as a form of freedom from social, economic, and institutional influences. Such a negative perspective on privacy, however, focuses too much on how individuals can be protected or can protect themselves instead of challenging the necessity for protection itself. Similar to treating symptoms of a disease instead of its causes, providing protection fails to acknowledge that the necessity for such… Read More »New Publication: Can online privacy literacy support informational self-determination?

Reconceptualizing online privacy literacy

In recent years, online privacy literacy has often been regarded as a potential solution to people’s seemingly paradoxical behaviors in online environments. Based on empirical findings that Internet users rarely implement privacy and data protection strategies, it has been suggested that they are simply not literate enough to make informed decisions in online environments. Throughout the last years, we have been working on reconceptualizing online privacy literacy and providing reliable and validated instruments to measure online… Read More »Reconceptualizing online privacy literacy

Book published: Situational Privacy and Self-Disclosure

I finally can say that I published my dissertation. Although my defense was already in December, it took some time to wrap everything up and get the book published. But what did I actually write about? Using both a theoretical argumentation and an empirical investigation, I rationalize the view that in order to understand people’s privacy perceptions and behaviors, we need to adopt a situational perspective. To this end, the book is divided into three… Read More »Book published: Situational Privacy and Self-Disclosure