Privacy in Social Media | Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics | Oxford Academic

Most people’s immediate concern about privacy in social media, and about the internet more generally, relates to data protection. People fear that information they post on various platforms is potentially abused by corporate entities, governments, or even criminals, in all sorts of nefarious ways. The main premise of this chapter is that concerns about data protection, legitimate and serious as they may be, are not, mostly, about the right to privacy. Privacy is about control over the presentation of the self, not about protection of property rights. From the perspective of privacy as self-presentation, I argue that social media is, generally, very conducive to privacy—in fact, often too much so. Social media enables a great deal of privacy at the expense of truth and authenticity. But the medium also comes with dangers of exposure that carry serious risks to privacy, potentially undermining peoples’ ability to control what aspects of themselves they present to others. Privacy in socia

Most people’s immediate concern about privacy in social media, and about the internet more generally, relates to data protection. People fear that information they post on various platforms is potentially abused by corporate entities, governments, or even criminals, in all sorts of nefarious ways. The main premise of this chapter is that concerns about data protection, legitimate and serious as they may be, are not, mostly, about the right to privacy. Privacy is about control over the presentation of the self, not about protection of property rights. From the perspective of privacy as self-pre