Challenges in studying social media privacy literacy

Social media privacy literacy can be defined as users’ knowledge about techniques and strategies they can apply themselves to protect their privacy on social media. It implies knowledge users have about data collection practices of social media platform providers and data protection regulations, and that they can reflect on potential privacy risks in such environments. As such, social media privacy literacy is one of several responses to emerging risks for privacy violations in the context of digital technologies. In this chapter, we highlight the strengths and weaknesses of existing conceptualizations of online privacy literacy, discuss how these have been applied to social media, call attention to methodological challenges in measuring online privacy literacy in general and social media literacy specifically, and review the existing empirical literature on online privacy literacy and how it is studied in the context of social media. In doing so, we outline limitations, challenges, and opportunities for future research. Most importantly, we argue that fostering social media privacy literacy is an important, albeit only one of many necessary responses to the increasing privacy threats on social media.