"Talking about privacy always feels like opening a can of worms.": How Intimate Partners Navigate Boundary-Setting in Mobile Phone Without Words

Paper Title

"'Talking about privacy always feels like opening a can of worms.': How Intimate Partners Navigate Boundary-Setting in Mobile Phone Without Words"

Publication Info

• Topic area: Digital privacy management in intimate relationships
• Keywords: Privacy silence, mobile phone privacy, intimate relationships, boundary-setting, trust, cultural norms, content sensitivity, non-verbal communication, privacy hierarchy, relationship dynamics

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Existing research on mobile phone privacy in intimate relationships focuses on explicit negotiations and harmful practices like surveillance, but little is known about how couples manage privacy non-verbally in healthy relationships.
• Significance: Understanding non-verbal privacy management is crucial for designing technologies and policies that support trust and intimacy while respecting individual boundaries.
• Motivation and related work: Prior work has explored explicit privacy rules, device-sharing practices, and trust dynamics but has not addressed the role of silence as a deliberate strategy for managing boundaries. This study builds on relational and contextual privacy theories to investigate how silence functions as a regulatory mechanism.

Solution

• Proposed approach: Introduction of the concept of "privacy silence," where intimate partners intentionally avoid discussing privacy boundaries as a relational strategy.
• Novelty:
  1. Conceptualization of privacy silence as a distinct form of boundary regulation.
  2. Development of a hierarchical grouping of privacy-sensitive content based on empirical data.
  3. Analysis of how privacy practices evolve across relationship stages and are shaped by cultural and societal norms.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Conducted 20 semi-structured interviews with participants aged 22–44 from diverse cultural backgrounds.
  • Used qualitative content analysis to identify patterns of privacy silence and construct a hierarchy of privacy-sensitive content.
  • Examined the interplay of trust, intimacy, and cultural influences in shaping privacy practices.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Identified five motivations for privacy silence: perceiving privacy as unnecessary in intimacy, assuming implicit respect for boundaries, using silence to signal trust, avoiding conflict, and societal/cultural influences.
  • Developed a hierarchical grouping of privacy-sensitive content, with financial information and family chats as highly private, and streaming accounts and location sharing as low-risk.
  • Privacy practices evolve with relationship stages, with early relationships marked by caution and long-term relationships characterized by selective openness.
• Advantage over baselines: Extends existing privacy theories by introducing silence as an active regulatory strategy and providing a nuanced, content-specific framework for understanding privacy in intimate relationships.
• Experiments / evaluation: Data collected through interviews analyzed for thematic saturation; findings grounded in participant narratives and supported by a structured coding framework.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Retrospective accounts may underreport tensions or overemphasize harmony.
  • Mixed interview modalities (text vs. voice) may have influenced response styles.
  • Future work should explore privacy norms across diverse cultural and relational contexts and develop interventions to encourage early privacy discussions.

Summary

This study introduces "privacy silence" as a relational strategy where intimate partners manage mobile phone privacy without explicit discussion. Through interviews with 20 participants, the researchers identified five motivations for silence and developed a hierarchical framework of privacy-sensitive content. Privacy practices were found to evolve with relationship stages, balancing trust, intimacy, and individual boundaries. The findings highlight the need for technologies and policies that respect tacit privacy practices while enabling constructive dialogue when necessary. This work advances privacy theory and offers actionable insights for designing systems that support both intimacy and autonomy.