Metaphors as Scaffolds: Spatial, Embodied, Fantastical, and Relational Framings for Youth Usable Privacy Design
TLDR
Different metaphors (spatial, embodied, fantastical, relational) significantly shape how youth reason about and manage digital privacy, impacting design.
Key contributions
- Spatial metaphors reduce cognitive load by leveraging intuitions from physical space navigation.
- Embodied metaphors create a shared moral vocabulary for negotiating public/private norms.
- Fantastical metaphors reframe privacy as discoverable play, boosting engagement with controls.
- Relational metaphors can mask institutional data flow, risking youth over-disclosure.
Why it matters
Mainstream privacy design is often abstract and administrative, failing to align with how youth reason about disclosure. This paper highlights how carefully chosen metaphors can better scaffold youth privacy interactions, making design an ethical choice.
Original Abstract
Mainstream usable privacy design frames privacy as administrative work -- settings, toggles, consent checkboxes -- abstracted from the relational, contextual, and embodied registers in which youth reason about disclosure. Drawing on a cross-project reading of three prior studies with youth aged 13--24, we examine how the metaphors that scaffold a privacy interaction shape the reasoning young users bring to it. \textit{Spatial} metaphors reduce cognitive load by recruiting intuitions about navigating physical space. \textit{Embodied} metaphors furnish a shared moral vocabulary that makes implicit norms about public and private space negotiable among users. \textit{Fantastical} metaphors recast privacy management as discoverable play, raising engagement with the granular controls that nuanced self-presentation requires. \textit{Relational} metaphors, by contrast, can lead youth past their own stated boundaries when felt intimacy masks institutional data flow, a risk already visible in AI companion products. Metaphor selection, we argue, is best understood as a first-order ethical design decision for youth privacy.
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