Metaphors as Scaffolds: Spatial, Embodied, Fantastical, and Relational Framings for Youth Usable Privacy Design
For designers of youth-facing privacy tools, the paper provides a framework to evaluate how interface metaphors affect user understanding and behavior, but the analysis is qualitative and incremental.
The paper argues that the metaphors used in privacy interfaces for youth (spatial, embodied, fantastical, relational) shape reasoning and engagement, with relational metaphors posing risks of boundary crossing, and positions metaphor selection as a first-order ethical design decision.
Mainstream usable privacy design frames privacy as administrative work -- settings, toggles, consent checkboxes -- abstracted from the relational, contextual, and embodied registers in which youth reason about disclosure. Drawing on a cross-project reading of three prior studies with youth aged 13--24, we examine how the metaphors that scaffold a privacy interaction shape the reasoning young users bring to it. \textit{Spatial} metaphors reduce cognitive load by recruiting intuitions about navigating physical space. \textit{Embodied} metaphors furnish a shared moral vocabulary that makes implicit norms about public and private space negotiable among users. \textit{Fantastical} metaphors recast privacy management as discoverable play, raising engagement with the granular controls that nuanced self-presentation requires. \textit{Relational} metaphors, by contrast, can lead youth past their own stated boundaries when felt intimacy masks institutional data flow, a risk already visible in AI companion products. Metaphor selection, we argue, is best understood as a first-order ethical design decision for youth privacy.