Online information disclosure and information privacy practices during significant life transitions: a scoping review

Significant life transitions are difficult and stressful periods, where personal identity and relationships undergo change. Accessing information and social support during these times requires disclosure: we must reveal information about ourselves to gain useful information. Yet, managing disclosure of information online during these periods presents great challenges and burdens to the central actor. We therefore sought to identify the information disclosure practices of people undergoing diverse selected life transitions (leaving the Armed Forces; relationship breakdown; coming out as LGBTQ+; living with cancer) with respect to online privacy and its implications for the design of information access systems. We achieved this via a scoping review, searching across nine databases to identify relevant articles, before carrying out an inductive thematic analysis of the charted data. We surface a key common disclosure strategy of multiple temporal selves, whereby people undergoing life transitions present multiple situated identities reflecting both their past and emerging identities, bound to desired levels of disclosure within specific online spaces/networks. This strategy is transacted via nuanced use of privacy features online, which calls for a high level of digital literacy. Our resulting design recommendations offer opportunities for information systems to support people in: safely partitioning their identity across new, and within existing, online spaces; creating spaces for personal reflection; and having a more informed awareness of the depth of information shared. The need for deeper understanding of the privacy requirements of two under-studied groups - leaving the Armed Forces, and living with cancer – is also highlighted.