American Academy of Advertising's 2025 Annual Conference

Due to the evolution of digital technologies in the social media landscape, new social media platforms, and increasing data privacy regulation, users' privacy concerns have gained importance for social media platforms, privacy policymakers, and marketing. In a globalized context, all these elements call into question the current conceptualization and dimensions of social media privacy concerns. Through a Delphi study, we aim to provide an updated view of the social media privacy concerns construct under platform-agnostic and cross-cultural perspectives. We redefine the construct, identify its dimensions, and propose a set of items to measure this multidimensional construct. Our findings show that social media privacy concerns comprise seven dimensions: Collection, Secondary use, Compliance, Transparency, Control, Improper access, and Profiling. These dimensions differ from prior conceptualizations and better reflect the growing importance of adherence to evolving regional privacy regulations and users’ understanding and knowledge regarding online advertising. We discuss how our findings offer important implications for the theory and the practice.

Please note: Speakers are automatically alphabetized by last name in SCHED. The speaker order here does not necessarily reflect the true authorship order of the presentation.