Talking about privacy always feels like opening a can of worms. How Intimate Partners Navigate Boundary-Setting in Mobile Phone Without Words

2026-01-23

AI Summary

This study investigates how intimate partners negotiate digital privacy boundaries in the absence of explicit verbal communication, drawing on semi-structured interviews with 20 couples and subsequent thematic analysis. It systematically identifies five distinct motivations underlying “privacy silence” and introduces a hierarchical model of content sensitivity that reveals a privacy gradient ranging from financial information to streaming service accounts. The findings indicate that partners often avoid privacy-related discussions to preserve relational trust, and that relationship stage significantly shapes privacy priorities. Furthermore, prevailing sociocultural norms are shown to suppress open expressions of privacy concerns. By elucidating the mechanisms of nonverbal privacy negotiation, this work advances theoretical understanding of privacy dynamics within digitally mediated intimate relationships.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Privacy
• Natural Language Processing: Ethics — Bias, Fairness, Transparency & Privacy
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Privacy-enhancing technologies
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: User privacy protection in personalized systems
• Semantics and Knowledge: Provenance, trust, security and privacy, and ethical issues in managing semantic data

Abstract

Mobile phones, as simultaneously personal and shared technologies, complicate how partners manage digital privacy in intimate relationships. While prior research has examined device-access practices, explicit privacy-rule negotiation, and toxic practices such as surveillance, little is known about how couples manage digital privacy without direct discussion in everyday relationships. To address this gap, we ask: How is digital privacy managed nonverbally and across different media on mobile phones? Drawing on 20 semi-structured interviews, we find that partners often regulate privacy practices through privacy silence -- the intentional avoidance of privacy-related conversations. We identify five motivations for leaving boundaries unspoken: perceiving privacy as unnecessary in intimacy, assuming implicit respect for boundaries, signaling trust and closeness, avoiding potential conflict or harm, and responding to broader societal and cultural expectations that discourage explicit privacy talk. We also identify a hierarchical grouping of content-specific privacy sensitivities, ranging from highly private domains such as financial data to lower-risk domains such as streaming accounts, and show how these priorities shift across relationship stages. These findings show how silence, culture, and content sensitivity shape everyday boundary-setting and underscore the relational and emotional dynamics underpinning mobile phone privacy management.

Problem

• digital privacy
• intimate relationships
• privacy silence
• boundary management
• mobile phones

Innovation

• privacy silence
• digital privacy
• intimate relationships
• boundary management
• mobile phone