Platforms, Privacy, and Expressive Power: A Comparative Study on Intimate Privacy Measures
Today, intimate privacy—which seeks to protect access to and information about our body, health, sexuality, gender, intimate thoughts, desires, preferences, and close personal relationships—is increasingly under threat. Social media platforms and networked technologies enable powerful new forms of surveillance to monitor, track, and quantify our intimate lives. Intimate personal images, information, and media are shared at mass scale online without consent. Smartphones are easily repurposed by spyware and stalkerware to spy on us and our partners. The home, increasingly wired with “smart” appliances, is no longer a sanctum for our most personal and private activities. Such violations of intimate privacy, which disproportionately impact women and minorities, have a profound impact: chilling victims into silence; denying sexual agency, intimacy, and equality; eroding trust necessary to forge relationships; and potentially leading to other forms of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. These challenges are even more urgent in our post-Dobbs era—a time when intimate privacy and deeply personal decisions about the body, health, and reproductive freedom are not only threatened, but criminalized.
Despite these significant threats and harms, comprehensive efforts to protect intimate privacy—both by governments and private sector actors—are rare. In fact, such efforts are often criticized and opposed on the basis they would likely chill speech, sharing, and the free flow of information online and off. Compounding the problem is a serious lack of systematic empirical and theoretical study of both intimate privacy and efforts to protect it. Seeking to fill this void, we discuss findings from new experimental studies—including a longitudinal study—exploring the impact of both legal and social media-based measures to protect intimate privacy. Contrary to claims of critics, we find such protective measures—rather than chilling speech and other activities—actually fostered trust, intimate sharing, and expression—especially among prior victims of online abuse and visible minorities. We also found that in some contexts social media/designed based privacy protections can have even greater salutary effects than law-based ones. We discuss the implications of these and other findings for law, public policy, and system design.