A GAME OF PRIVACY TUG OF WAR: A HISTORICAL ANALYSIS OF PRIVACY SETTINGS

Resumen

Privacy settings are a critical mechanism for platforms to manage, control, and impact user privacy online. The policies of social media platforms and their technical design—including the choice architecture of privacy settings—"serve as a form of privatized governance directly enacting rights and regulating the flow of information online (DeNardis & Hackl, 2015). Many platforms use a rhetoric of “choice and control,” relying on privacy settings to shoulder the burden of responsibility for user privacy (Horne, 2021). Another challenge to privacy on social media platforms is that there is a wide disparity of settings choices across different platforms, with varying defaults (Horne, 2023). Additionally, the interconnection and the technical importance of privacy settings has a clear and well-established history. This paper examines this history via a historical analysis of Meta’s changes to privacy settings. The analysis focuses on Meta as it is one of the oldest and largest of social media platforms; it also hosts a comprehensive archive of news articles, which tracks critical updates to Meta products. The study seeks to determine what privacy settings changes Meta has made, when the changes were announced, as well as analyze how these changes were framed in news articles.