Taste for Privacy: How Context, Identity, and Lived-Experience Shape Information Sharing Preferences

2026-04-23

AI Summary

This study addresses the contextual dependency and individual heterogeneity of privacy preferences, which static consent mechanisms inadequately accommodate. Drawing on 2,912 longitudinal survey responses from 782 university students between 2023 and 2024, it examines comfort levels in sharing personally identifiable information (PII) across 17 institutional contexts and associated social media privacy settings. Integrating statistical modeling, institutional trust rankings, and multidimensional variable analysis, the findings reveal that approximately two-thirds of users maintained private accounts in 2024, with discomfort regarding PII sharing on social platforms significantly predicting privacy-protective behaviors. Marginalized groups exhibited lower trust in authoritative institutions, while overall institutional trust structures remained stable yet varied across institution types. The study elucidates linkages among privacy preferences, institutional trust, marginalized identities, and childhood adversity, proposing an adaptive privacy governance framework attuned to contextual sensitivity and group vulnerability.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Privacy
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Natural Language Processing: Ethics — Bias, Fairness, Transparency & Privacy

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: User privacy protection in personalized systems
• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Responsible Web: Consent frameworks and practices on the web

Abstract

Privacy preferences are not fixed individual traits, they depend on context and lived experiences. In this study, we analyze 2,912 survey responses from 782 college students collected over seven survey periods during 2023 and 2024. We ask about their usage of social media, the security settings of their accounts, and measure their comfort in sharing personally identifiable information (PII) across 17 different institutional contexts. Compared to past research, we observe a large shift towards private accounts, going from 1/3rd private in 2007 to 2/3rds in 2024, and find that participants' discomfort sharing PII with social media platforms strongly predicts their privacy settings. Beyond social media, we identify a stable ranking of institutional trust, though some institutions, like the police, show high variability reflecting divergent lived experiences. Traditionally marginalized groups and participants having faced adverse childhood experiences show more discomfort with institutions of power, especially in areas where they face greater vulnerability. We argue for context-adaptive privacy settings that recognize institutional relationships and demographic vulnerabilities, moving beyond one-size-fits-all consent frameworks toward contextually appropriate data governance.

Problem

• privacy preferences
• context
• lived experience
• institutional trust
• data governance

Innovation

• context-adaptive privacy
• institutional trust
• lived experience
• privacy preferences
• demographic vulnerability