Measuring Individuals' Concerns over Collective Privacy on Social Networking Sites

With the rise of social networking sites (SNSs), individuals not only disclose personal information but also share private information concerning others online. While shared information is co-constructed by self and others, personal and collective privacy boundaries become blurred. Thus there is an increasing concern over information privacy beyond the individual level. Drawing on the Communication Privacy Management theory, we conceptualize individuals’ concerns over collective privacy on SNSs, with three distinctive dimensions—collective information access, control and diffusion, and develop a scale of collective SNS privacy concern (SNSPC) through empirical validation. Structural model analyses confirm the three-dimension structure of collective SNSPC and indicate perceived risk and propensity to value privacy as two antecedents. We discuss key findings, implications and future research directions for theorizing and examining privacy as a collective issue.