Hello Everyone - I am Sheza Naveed and today I am going to be talking to you about our work
"Ask this from the person who has private stuff": Privacy Perceptions,
Behaviours and Beliefs Beyond W.E.I.R.D. This work was done in Pakistan with
my collaborators Hamza Naveed, Dr. Mobin Javed and Dr. Maryam Mustafa.
We present findings from our study conducted in different areas of Lahore,
Pakistan exploring privacy perceptions, behaviors and beliefs in the global south
and the intersection of religions norms and values with privacy. Unlike prior work,
in addition to focusing on privacy behaviours we also explore the norms, beliefs and value systems
that dictate privacy perceptions and practices in patriarchal, non-secular contexts like Pakistan.
Our work makes three unique contributions: 1) reveals the patriarchal norms and
religious values that determine how boundaries are enacted and how privacy
is defined, 2) within this understanding of appropriate behaviours explores how
privacy is enacted and what strategies are employed by low-literate men and
women to navigate the norms and perform privacy, and 3) presents design implications to include
non-secular values, to help vulnerable groups in navigating pre-determined norms and empowering
low-literate users to leverage privacy affordances.
As more and more people come online and gain access to devices and the Internet in contexts
beyond Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD) populations, it
is vital to understand privacy perceptions, mechanisms, behavior and beliefs of diverse
populations in non-Western contexts. Johnson describes the patriarchal
system as an "arrangement of shared understandings and relationships that
connect people to one another", defining certain values and behaviours as expected
and appropriate . It is important to explore how these pre-defined norms of appropriateness
impact the privacy perceptions and behaviours of not just women but
also men (whose values are also embedded within the patriarchal structure) in
contexts that are traditionaly less well-understood in privacy literature.
The study was conducted in Lahore, Pakistan from January 2021 to July 2021. We conducted one on
one semi-structured interviews in Urdu with low literate participants. The semi-structured
interviews explored the privacy perceptions, privacy-preserving mechanisms, the application
specific privacy practices and the motivations of implementation of such practices.
Moreover, each session also focused on the participant’s mental
models regarding privacy features, the sources of learning about these features
and their perspective on how privacy should co-exist across gender, social and cultural norms.
Participants were recruited using snowball sampling through personal contacts.
Participants belonged to low-literate, low-income areas of Lahore.
Sessions were held every week until saturation was reached.
We interviewed both male and female participants to maintain gender balance and understand how each
impacted the privacy practices of the other. The majority of our participants had less than
12 years of schooling with a small number who had completed 12 years of education. There was
a mix of married and unmarried participants, the majority of them living in joint family systems.
Participants belonged to different unskilled and semi-skilled professions.
Our findings significantly differentiate in how female participants understood
and performed privacy versus male participants. We also found religion
to play an important role in determining users privacy perceptions and behaviours.
Pakistan is a predominantly Muslim country and participants relied heavily on their
interpretations of Islamic beliefs to conceptualize and enact digital privacy.
Islamic values and beliefs form the foundations on
which much of what our male and female participants considered private. ‘Purdah’
and ‘Haya’ were the two predominant beliefs influencing men’s and women’s understandings of
the private. Purdah is understood as a covering and in Muslim communities it is predominantly
linked with women’s bodies and protecting them from immodest eyes and men’s gaze. Although
the term refers to a physical covering, it also implies a covering in terms of the
language used and often in terms of women’s presence in physical and digital spaces.
Segregation of genders is one performative form which Purdah takes in public and private spaces
in many Muslim countries. Our work reveals this segregation to also be enacted in the digital
space as a form of ‘Digital Purdah’, keeping digital spaces ‘private’ and secluded from men.
A common theme across interviews with female participants was the association of
privacy and the desire for privacy with ‘scandalous’ and inappropriate content.
This again is grounded in the Islamic belief in ‘modesty’ and purdah. However,
in contrast to our female users this was not a common theme amongst the male participants.
Male participants did not report sharing passwords because they had nothing to hide, instead,
they had reasons where their friends or family needed to use their phones for making calls, etc.
Our female participants were particularly concerned with the negative connotation
of privacy - i.e. if you have not done anything ‘wrong’, you do not need privacy.
In exploring women’s privacy practices we find them to be leveraging specific mechanisms
to ensure privacy on digital devices without obviously appearing to be enacting privacy. In
contrast, most of our male participants' privacy practices are more open, obvious and deliberate.
In our context, privacy is not established or maintained within an individualistic framework
but is understood as a collective, i.e. preserving the family's privacy, honor and dignity. Female
users who, even when they have their personal devices, share passwords with family members
and want to give the impression of an ‘open’ device and digital space that the family is
free to monitor and see. This context of a sort of secret privacy, where users would
like to enact specific boundaries but would like these boundaries to be invisible and untraceable.
Many participants used after market applications to supplement their privacy needs. WhatsApp is
one of the applications which was used by all our participants on a regular basis.
Although WhatsApp provides many built-in privacy features, 17.4% female and 35.3% male participants
reported the use of after market/modded versions of WhatsApp known as GB WhatsApp and FM WhatsApp.
These applications provide additional features over standard WhatsApp,
some of which include: 1) viewing status without notifying the other person, 2) reading messages
without them being marked as read, 3) being able to view deleted stories and messages, etc.
The contacts of a person using a modded version of WhatsApp are unaware of its use - on their
end the application looks and functions exactly like the official application.
The privacy-related norms we observe are determined and set by male beliefs
of women’s place in society, their beliefs of how women should be using technologies,
and how much access they should have to social networking sites. Religion,
modesty and the performance of piety are a second integral factor in how users decide what kind of
content can be shared and with whom and what kind of contacts and relationships are ‘appropriate’.
We would go so far as to argue that in our context, privacy can not be conceptualized as a
secular concept, it needs to be re-imagined within a religious framework drawing from Islamic beliefs
and understanding of what is appropriate, what are the boundaries that must be enacted and for whom.
For example, the feature of a private conversation mode would
allow conversations where there is no trace of the conversation or media left
on the device. A private mode will allow any shared content to be restricted to that
session only and private interactions will be broken down into sessions.
While some social networking platforms like Facebook provide mechanisms for limiting
audiences, these are based on secular values and do not easily allow for gender segregation
or having a tiered mechanism where contacts maybe assigned a family role and then a subset of that
as a Mahram with special privileges; a Mahram is always family but all male family members are
not considered Mahram. This could mean multiple custom lists on WhatsApp allowing users to upload
their WhatsApp statuses (images and videos that expire) for specific lists of contacts.
For more details on specific design guidelines and details about our study please see the paper.