Hi everyone, I’m Yanlai Wu from the University of Central Florida.
Today, I’m going to present my paper entitled ‘I am concerned, but…’: streamers’ privacy concerns and strategies in live streaming information disclosure.
This paper was under the supervision of Dr. Yao Li from the University of Central Florida
and in collaboration with Dr. Xinning Gui from the Penn State University.
Live streaming is a unique form of social media that allows users to create, share and
watch videos in real-time.
Live streaming is popular worldwide.
For example, we have platforms like Twitch TV in North America and DouYu in China.
Streamers are the ones who broadcast themselves to audiences through live streaming platforms.
A streamer can disclose lots of personal information during streaming, including gender, look,
room layout, performance, and so on.
Live streaming is different from traditional social media that have been studied, like
Facebook and Instagram.
First, users use live streaming and traditional social media for different purposes.
Users use traditional social media to maintain their social network.
But streamers use live streaming to perform, attract audiences and earn money.
Second, traditional social media is asynchronous, but live streaming is synchronous.
Unlike users who can edit their posts on traditional social media, streamers cannot make any changes
in real-time.
Their performances are directly sent to their audiences through webcam and microphone.
Therefore, we can often see streamers face privacy risks in the news.
Their online information disclosure might lead to many negative consequences, such as
cyberbullying, stalking, and online harassment.
Since most social media examined are asynchronous, findings may not apply to privacy management
on live streaming platforms where information sharing and consuming are in real-time.
In addition, previous privacy research in live streaming is about bystanders’ privacy concerns.
Streamers’ privacy concerns have not been studied.
Thus we seek to answer the following research questions: What privacy concerns do streamers have in live streaming?
And what are the coping strategies that streamers adopt to manage their information disclosure in live streaming?
To answer the questions, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 DouYu streamers in Oct 2020.
We chose DouYu as the study site because: First, DouYu is one of the most popular live
streaming platforms and has been studied several times in prior work; Second, DouYu shares
many privacy and information disclosure features with other popular live streaming platforms as shown in the table.
We analyzed data through thematic analysis in an inductive approach.
We find two categories of privacy concerns that participants had during live streaming.
First, there are tensions between streamers’ privacy and attractiveness.
Second, there are tensions between streamers’ privacy and interpersonal boundary with the audience.
Physical boundary and virtual boundary.
Although streamers were concerned with disclosing their physical features, such as look and
apparel, during live streaming, they still chose to disclose such information for attracting audiences.
In addition, physical attractiveness is more important for female streamers than for male streamers.
For example, this 28-year-old female reported that turning on webcam was necessary for female
streamers because audiences were coming for the pretty faces.
She encountered unfriendly audiences and negative comments when she only displayed hands and voice at first.
However, such a situation rarely happened to male streamers.
For privacy vs. task attractiveness, some streamers, especially female streamers who
just begin to stream and have a few audiences, chose to trade their personal information
for task attractiveness, even though they had concerns that disclosing their gender,
body movement skills, intimate personal details, and personal preferences would lead to more
biases towards female streamers.
For instance, this 22-year-old female reported that even though she was worried about being
seen doing those sexual things in her streaming by her friends, she still chose to disclose
such information to make her audience happy.
Streamers also had concerns that disclosing social identities would harm their social attractiveness.
They worried about disclosing real-world relationships, social life, interests, and opinions would
make audiences feel them less attractive.
For example, P20 decided to hide her authentic romantic relationship because her audience
expected her to be single.
Streamers had concerns with undesired physical contact from audiences.
They were unwilling to disclose their mailing address, school/workplace address, whereabouts,
the scenery, and landmarks outside the window of their rooms.
For example, P20 declined her audience’s food delivery offer because she didn’t want
the audience to know her exact location in the real world, she didn’t want to pay for
the cost brought by the physical contact bleach.
Streamers were also concerned with unwanted virtual contacts, such as game ID, phone number, and email addresses.
But such information can be accidentally disclosed when streamers open a document, a webpage,
a push-up notification, or a message, or when they logged in/out of websites.
Once the contact information is exposed, streamers could be harassed by vicious viewers unexpectedly.
For example, P10 told us that a streamer got tons of calls after accidentally exposing
his phone number during live streaming.
The strategies can be divided into platform-supported strategies and self-developed strategies.
Streamers usually adopted three features embedded in DouYu to protect their privacy: Pausing
streaming, managing sources of streaming content, and also adding an overlay.
Streamers also adopted self-developed strategies to deal with privacy concerns.
They adjusted the lighting setup to look more attractive, used the green curtain to avoid
busy backgrounds, and used more than one computer monitor to self-censor their physical appearance
and actions during live streaming.
Streamers also disabled the notifications in settings of the operation systems to deal
with the concerns brought by the change of context.
But these strategies are not flawless.
Streamers are encountering two types of challenges that cannot be addressed by existing privacy
management strategies: unpredictability, uncertainty and unexpectedness in privacy management strategies
and cognitive burden brought by the privacy management strategies.
For example, P15 accidentally disclosed his chat with his girlfriend to the audience because
he forgot to delete the chat history, which made him look very unprofessional as a gaming streamer.
Building upon our discussion of the privacy concerns and strategies that the streamers
have, we offer several design implications for live streaming platforms.
First, we suggest live streaming tools should provide streamers with online interactive
tutorials and highlight true stories about privacy breaches that have happened to other
streamers to raise streamers’ awareness of the long-term privacy risks.
Second, live streaming tools should provide more intelligent and adaptive features to
help streamers balance between privacy and attractiveness.
We also suggest embedding surveys and interviews in the live streams to help streamers know
the audience’s needs so that streamers can make better decisions between their privacy and performance.
Third, since many streamers mentioned that they have trouble managing their privacy due
to the change of context, integrated, intelligent, and granular notification features should
be offered to assist streamers to notice the real-time change of information sharing context.
Last, to address gender issues in the privacy management in live streaming, streamers can
turn from help from female moderators or loyal female audiences.
Thanks for your listening.