Safer sexting: Who cares and how?

Description

Sexting denotes digital sexual interactions from text messages to video-calls. Involving sensitive data, it necessitates privacy management. To assess sexting-related privacy management, we developed the Safer Sexting Scale (SSS) including four privacy management strategies and examined what predicts the employment of each of the four strategies. The SSS distinguishes four kinds of privacy strategies along two dimensions – namely behaviors that individuals employ alone or in interaction with their sexting partner (personal vs. interpersonal) as well as behaviors before or after sexting (preventive vs. reactive). As predictors, we tested privacy concerns, rejection sensitivity, sexting frequency, and sexting frequency in interaction with loneliness. Results of a preregistered online survey in a quota-based sample of 557 sexters (49.9% male) between 16 to 40 (M = 28.97, SD = 6.67) validated the four-factor structure of the SSS and showed differential effects for the four strategies. Concerning predictors of sexting privacy management, we found privacy concerns against the sexting partner to predict all privacy strategies, while concerns about how apps handle data were unrelated to protection behaviors. Individuals with higher rejection sensitivity did not report less privacy management. If more frequent sexting was related to more employment of protection behaviors depended on whether individuals sent storable files (e.g., sexy pictures or videos) or had synchronous audio or video-calls. Effects of sexting frequency on privacy management were independent of loneliness. Thus, unprotected sexting was reported with trusted sexting partners and by infrequent sexters. Overall, our four-dimensional model could be applied to other domains of privacy management.

Period	17 Sept 2024
Event title	53rd DGPS Congress/15th ÖGP Conference 2024
Event type	Conference
Location	Vienna, AustriaShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International