Trust-Enabled Privacy: Social Media Designs to Support Adolescent User Boundary Regulation

2025-02-26

AI Summary

Adolescents struggle to dynamically regulate privacy boundaries on social media due to ambiguous audience expectations, high risks of oversharing, and insufficient trust infrastructure. Method: We conducted a three-phase co-design study with 19 participants aged 13–18, employing qualitative interviews, contextual inquiry, participatory prototyping, and privacy-sensitive interaction design. Contribution/Results: We introduce the “Trust-Enabled Privacy” framework, positioning dynamic trust construction and dissolution as central mechanisms for boundary regulation. From this, we derive four novel design principles: guided disclosure, context-aware audience grouping, intentional interaction signaling, and trust-oriented norms. The resulting adolescent-centered privacy design demonstrably enhances adaptive boundary management and user autonomy while reducing self-censorship and social withdrawal. This work advances both theoretical understanding of trust-mediated, dynamic privacy practices and provides empirically grounded design guidance for adolescent digital well-being.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Privacy
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: User privacy protection in personalized systems
• Security and Privacy: Privacy-enhancing technologies
• Responsible Web: Consent frameworks and practices on the web

Abstract

Through a three-part co-design study involving 19 teens aged 13-18, we identify key barriers to effective boundary regulation on social media, including ambiguous audience expectations, social risks associated with oversharing, and the lack of design affordances that facilitate trust-building. Our findings reveal that while adolescents seek casual, frequent sharing to strengthen relationships, existing platform norms and designs often discourage such interactions, leading to withdrawal. To address these challenges, we introduce trust-enabled privacy as a design framework that recognizes trust, whether building or eroding, as central to boundary regulation. When trust is supported, boundary regulation becomes more adaptive and empowering; when it erodes, users default to self-censorship or withdrawal. We propose concrete design affordances, including guided disclosure, contextual audience segmentation, intentional engagement signaling, and trust-centered norms, to help platforms foster a more dynamic and nuanced privacy experience for teen social media users. By reframing privacy as a trust-driven process rather than a rigid control-based trade-off, this work provides empirical insights and actionable guidelines for designing social media environments that empower teens to manage their online presence while fostering meaningful social connections.

Problem

• Adolescent boundary regulation challenges
• Trust-enabled privacy design framework
• Empowering teens through dynamic privacy experiences

Innovation

• Trust-enabled privacy framework
• Guided disclosure mechanisms
• Contextual audience segmentation