Communication privacy management theory

CPM theory aims to develop an evidence-based understanding of the way people make decisions about revealing and concealing private information.

It suggests that individuals maintain and coordinate privacy boundaries (the limits of what they are willing to share) with various communication partners depending on the perceived benefits and costs of information disclosure.

Petronio believes disclosing private information will strengthen one's connections with others, and that we can better understand the rules for disclosure in relationships through negotiating privacy boundaries.

This theory argues that when people disclose private information, they depend on a rule-based management system to control the level of accessibility.

However, Altman believed that openness was just one part belonging to a larger whole, one which expanded to include privacy with Leslie A. Baxter's work on relational dialectics theory.

[9] This a difficult process, considering that each owner will approach the information from distinct viewpoints and referencing their personal criteria for privacy rule development.

The daughter in this case must weigh the risks of breaking the family privacy boundary against the benefits of the doctor being better informed of her father's condition.

Petronio's understanding and argument of privacy management rests on the idea that a dialectic exists wherever the decision is made to disclose or conceal private information.

[18] To validate the effectiveness and feasibility of the communication privacy management theoretical frameworks, Petronio tested them using different methods including and not limited to qualitative and quantitative research.

Research focused on secrets and topic avoidance, such as questions of concealment to stepfamily members feeling caught, and parents-adolescent conversations about sex.

For example, work by Hawk and his colleagues explore perceived parental invasions from the view of adolescents in reaction to such issues as control attempts, solicitation of information, and conflict outcomes.

[27] Privacy practices in social network sites often appear paradoxical, as content-sharing behavior stands in conflict with the need to reduce disclosure-related harms.

One study explored privacy in social network sites as a contextual information practice, managed by a process of boundary regulation.

[30] As social media continues to develop and become an essential part in everyday life, more younger audiences are attuned to how much information is under surveillance.

[34] Sandra Petronio and other researchers used CPM to study young adults' tendencies to manage their privacy and communicate on Facebook with different generations of family members.

Another case study analyzing the responses of 240 participants revealed that the communication privacy practices by individuals using Facebook strongly impact the "amount and depth" of their self-disclosure.

[38] The study provided evidence that co-workers' connection on Facebook improves only when each party understands the rules which govern privacy management.

The research found out that there were significant differences at the descriptive and inferential levels among the multiple dimensions of private information, including daily lives, social identity, competence, socio-economic status, and health.

The result shows that the vast majority of participants perceived more benefits from disclosing their larger identity than risks, regardless of weight-loss method.

Using CPM theory as a framework, a study surveyed a community sample of 273 adults to examine their retrospective accounts of privacy violations in personal relationships.

Results showed that less than half of the sample offered explicit rules for information management, and the majority of participants blamed the confidant for the privacy turbulence.

Companies have had to take measures to secure their network further or even decide whether they want employees to access personal accounts (i.e., email) or devices while on the job.

For instance, a study that examined intercultural privacy management between foreign English teachers and Japanese co-workers uncovered cultural premises.

This "study highlights four cultural premises that garner intercultural privacy management between foreign English language teachers (ELTs) and Japanese coworkers (JCWs) in Japan[71] The analysis revealed that ELTs: (a) expected not to be a "free space" for privacy inquisition by JCWs, and (b) expected voluntary reciprocity in (egalitarian) workplace relationships.

"[72] Within the same context, foreign English teachers "employed the following management strategies: (a) withdrawal, (b) cognitive restructuring, (c) independent control, (d) lying, (e) omission, (f) avoidance, and (g) gaijin smashing.

After a disclosure, couples were found to manage boundaries for the owned private information in several ways: Inclusive, intersected, interrelated or unified.

[74] Dominic Pecoraro also studied privacy management among members of the LGBT community, and included performative face theory and facework into his paradigm of why, when and how queer individuals disclose their sexual identities.

Public disclosure via "coming out" normalizes different sexual identities, providing resistance to face threats due to heteronormativity.

Both expectancy violations theory and CPM are related through how they deal with physical proximity, privacy and how close individuals allow other people to come to them.

It has argued that CPM takes a dualistic approach, treating privacy and disclosure as independent of one another and able to coexist in tandem rather than in the dynamic interplay characteristic of dialectics.