Temporal Drift in Privacy Recall: Users Misremember From Verbatim Loss to Gist-Based Overexposure

Abstract

With social media content traversing the different platforms, occasionally resurfacing after periods of time, users are increasingly prone to unintended disclosure resulting from a misremembered acceptance of privacy. Context collapse and interface cues are two factors considered by prior researchers, yet we know less about how time-lapse basically alters recall of past audiences destined for exposure. Likewise, the design space for mitigating this temporal exposure risk remains underexplored. Our work theorizes temporal drift in privacy recall as verbatim memory of prior settings blowing apart and eventually settling with gist-based heuristics, which more often than not select an audience larger than the original one. Grounded in memory research, contextual integrity, and usable privacy, we examine why such a drift occurs, why it tends to bias toward broader sharing, and how it compounds upon repeat exposure. Following that, we suggest provenance-forward interface schemes and a risk-based evaluation framework that mutates recall into recognition. The merit of our work lies in establishing a temporal awareness of privacy design as an essential safety rail against inadvertent overexposure.