Two Accounts of Solitude in Online Communal Networks

Privacy is one of the friction points that emerge when communications get mediated in Online Social Networks (OSNs). Different communities of computer science researchers have framed the OSN privacy problem as one of surveillance, institutional or social privacy. In tackling these problems they have also treated them as if they were independent. We argue that the different privacy problems are entangled and that research on privacy in OSNs would benefit from a more holistic approach. In this article, we first provide an introduction to the surveillance and social privacy perspectives emphasizing the narratives that inform them, as well as their assumptions, goals and methods. We then juxtapose the differences between these two approaches in order to understand their complementarily, and to identify potential integration challenges as well as research questions that so far have been left unanswered.