Your life through the eyes of others : A qualitative study about the privacy of younger women on Instagram

Since social media is used more today than just a few years ago, it is easier to share our lives to the public in just a few seconds. Social media is easily accessible on smartphones, tablets and computers which allow us users to use them whenever we want. Instagram is an example of a very popular social media today. In this paper we focus on how younger women think about their privacy when using and publishing pictures on Instagram. We have been using a qualitative research method in which ten people were interviewed. All respondents agreed that privacy is important when publishing pictures or videos on Instagram, but there were also some differences between users with public and private accounts. This study’s result demonstrate that previous experience of risk associated with sharing private information and user's purpose of sharing on social media, affects younger women's ways of thinking about their privacy on Instagram. This is because previous experience of risks affects the user's trust towards a social network, which often determines what purpose the user has by sharing. The purpose of sharing may in many cases outweigh the risks associated with the partition itself, when likes, comments, and an increased number of followers encourage the user to continue with its behavior