Review of Research on Privacy Decision Making from a Time Perspective

Abstract

Managing privacy is a process in which people continuously negotiate the boundaries of their personal space. Time is embedded in and influences this continuous negotiation. Digital technologies increasingly incorporate temporal elements, such as allowing users to define the expiration date of social network postings. Yet, researchers have not systematically examined the effects of temporal elements in privacy decision making. In this paper, we review how existing information privacy research has related to time in terms of three dimensions: duration, timing, and past, present, and future modalities. Our findings suggest that 1) duration has a negative influence on information disclosure; 2) timing, in the form of personal and external events, influences how people make privacy decisions; and 3) sensemaking that involves prior experience and planning for the future affect privacy decisions. We discuss how privacy decision making frameworks need to be adjusted to account for a time perspective.