Comparative Approaches to Studying Privacy: Introduction to the Special Issue

This editorial introduces the Social Media + Society special issue “Comparative Approaches To Studying Privacy.” Recognizing the importance of privacy in today’s digital societies and volatile political and regulatory environments, the editorial highlights the pressing need for comparative research on the topic and describes the articles in this special issue. The special issue addresses the theoretical, methodological, and practical challenges and opportunities of researching privacy across cultural, social, political, economic, and technological units of comparison. The articles in the special issue explore diverse privacy understandings, attitudes, and practices across contexts, challenging decontextualized and mono-cultural understandings in relation to social media and adjacent technologies. The special issue articles also illustrate fruitful ways privacy can be studied across different units of comparison with qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods. Several contributions in the special issue, including this editorial, not only broaden the scope of privacy research but also encourage engagement with multi-stakeholder perspectives in the context of social media, considering the role of policy, industry, and civil society. In the editorial, we briefly relate the special issue and its contributions to the comparative privacy research framework (CPRF), which serves as a useful starting point and a solid conceptual foundation for comparative privacy research. Finally, we develop a research agenda for future comparative privacy research, which critically examines position of power and epistemological biases, evaluates the comparability of the subject of study, determining and justifying relevant units of comparison, and helps to analyze how these units interact in shaping the concept of privacy.