Communication privacy management theory (CPM) helps explain how people perceive the information they hold about themselves and whether they will disclose or protect it (Petronio, 2000, 2002). CPM explains why Celeste, for example, will boldly share her religious beliefs, whereas Eddie will keep his faith intensely private. CPM theory presumes that people believe they own their private information and need to set up boundaries to control the potential risks that may make them vulnerable (Petronio, 2004).

Two key features of relationships are central to privacy management. First, privacy management is affected by the dialectical tension of openness versus closedness, discussed earlier. You want to share information in order to increase intimacy with your partner, but it may be risky to do so, and maintaining private information is a worthy goal in its own right. Second, privacy management requires cultural, situational, and relational rules or expectations by which people must be willing to abide. For example, it would likely be considered impolite for you to ask your boss about his medical condition because that topic is far too private for a work context in many cultures, and you are unlikely to have that level of personal intimacy with your manager. Yet that type of disclosure is expected in close relationships (Derlega, Winstead, Mathews, & Braitman, 2008).

If there is a threat to your privacy boundaries (for example, your trusted friend told your secret to someone else), you experience boundary turbulence and must readjust your need for privacy against your need for self-disclosure and connection (Guerrero, Andersen, & Afifi, 2013; Theiss, Knobloch, Checton, & Magsamen-Conrad, 2009). Boundary turbulence occurs in mediated situations, too. If you have personal information about someone else, do you have the right to “tweet” that? What about inside jokes or pictures taken at a party—do you have the right to share them with others? Judgments can be made about you based on what your “friends” do on Facebook (Walther, Van Der Heide, Kim, Westerman, & Tong, 2008), and you often alter the kinds of disclosures you make depending on whether or not your parents are Facebook friends (Child & Westermann, 2013) or whether you are messaging friends who are distant versus nearby (Waters & Ackerman, 2011). So you can see how complex privacy management becomes in online communication.