Protecting teenagers’ gaming privacy: the roles of parental mediation, platform protection, and risky encounters

The popularity of mobile gaming among teenagers has raised concerns about privacy breaches. By integrating social cognitive theory and protection motivation theory, this study is the first to investigate how parental mediation, platform functions, and self-learning affect teen players’ risk perception and prevention in the gaming environment. We surveyed 561 high school students who play mobile games regularly aged between 15 and 19 in China. This study found that parental mediation increases teen players’ privacy risk perception and self-efficacy, while the ease of privacy functions provided by gaming platforms enhances young players’ self-efficacy and protective behaviours in gaming interactions. Teen players’ risky encounters in games were found to increase their privacy concerns. Additionally, our research indicated that optimistic bias negatively moderates the effect of privacy concerns on protective behaviours. The current study extended the social cognitive theory by assessing multiple roles in teen gamers’ social learning of privacy risks, including the platform, parental guidance, personal observation and revealed that both objective risk perceptions and biased optimistic perceptions could impact behavioural outcomes. Our findings offer practical implications for designing more user-friendly privacy features and enhancing parental mediation to promote responsible gaming among teenagers.