Communication Privacy Management Theory: What Do We Know About Family Privacy Regulation?

For families, managing private information is challenging. Family members reveal too much, they allow more privacy access to outsiders than others desire, parents attempt to negotiate Internet disclosures with their teens, and family health issues often change the way private information is defined altogether. The complexities of privacy regulation call for a systematic way to grasp how privacy management operates in families. This article presents the evidenced‐based theory of communication privacy management (CPM) and corresponding research on family privacy regulation that provides a road map to understand the multifaceted nature of managing private information ( Petronio, 2002 ). The article discusses contributions of CPM to conceptualizing privacy in meaningful ways, along with current research trends and future directions for CPM research and theorizing.