Chapter 1 Introduction to Privacy Online Joseph B. Walther Even before the various networks supporting online communication converged as the Internet, tensions existed between users’ desires to communicate online in very personal ways and their assumptions that their disclosures would or should be treated as privileged and private. These tensions have not abated with the advent of social media. Just as it was with the most bare-bones, text-based online communities of the past, it is with contemporary media: The more users disclose of themselves, the more they may enjoy the benefits these systems have to offer. At the same time, the more they disclose, the more they risk what they themselves consider breaches of their privacy. In light of this ongoing issue, this volume is not only timely in the manner in which it addresses these tensions as they are manifest in contemporary social media platforms, it also contributes to a tradition of research on the dualism of privacy, privilege, and social interaction that online communica- tion has incurred as far back as (or farther than) the advent of the Internet itself. Three complicating factors that have and continue to confront users of online systems include (1) a misplaced presumption that online behavior is private, (2) that the nature of the Internet at a mechanical level is quite incommensurate with privacy, and (3) that one’s expectation of privacy does not constitute privileged communication by definition. Perhaps it is due to the analogous offline activities which online communication resembles or replaces, that many Internet users notoriously post information online which they do not anticipate will be seen by others than the specific group they imagined when posting. A personal face-to-face conversation is fleeting. A phone call is most likely to be confined to the dyad that conducts it. A social party on held private property is presumably self-contained. These settings allow participants to maintain their sense of privacy consistent with the definitions reflected in Stephen Margulis’s Chap. 2, that focus on individuals determining for themselves when, J.B. Walther (*) Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA e-mail: jwalther@msu.edu S. Trepte and L. Reinecke (eds.), Privacy Online, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-21521-6_1, # Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011 3