Birds of a feather: Collective privacy of online social activist groups

Privacy, usually conceptualized as an individual's right or control over their private information, also encompasses social aspects and collaborative management of co-created and co-owned information. Such issues become highly evident in the online communication of social activist groups. Through interviews with members of several such groups, this paper examines how collective privacy is constructed, managed, negotiated, and enacted. The particular strategies for collective privacy employed by each group emerged from a confluence of the group's defining characteristics and core values, the dynamics of interactions within the group, and the group's relationships with people and entities external to it. After articulating how collective privacy differs from and builds upon previous conceptualizations of privacy, the paper concludes with implications for designing socio-technological tools that enable and facilitate protection of collective privacy especially for sensitive or vulnerable online groups.