“I’m not a very public person,” twenty-two year old Walter Woodman tells the New Yorker in How A Relationship Dies on Facebook.
One of the assumptions of the social media industry is that digital natives, those born after 1990, have little if any expectations of privacy. The New Yorker story challenges that idea.
Much of the New Yorker’s background is taken from the Pew Centre’s May 2013 report Teens, Social Media and Privacy which interviewed 802 US teens and their parents to identify young adults’ attitudes towards privacy.
As the Pew Centre’s Mary Madden wrote in a follow up post to that report, US teenagers aren’t about to about to abandon Facebook yet but they are concerned about privacy and the work involved in managing an online persona.
While some of our teen focus group participants reported positive feelings about their use of Facebook, many spoke negatively about an increasing adult presence, the high stakes of managing self-presentation on the site, the burden of negative social interactions (“drama”), or feeling overwhelmed by friends who share too much.
This suggests a far more mature, and complex, understanding of privacy by teenagers than many of the social media boosters assumed when declaring that privacy is irrelevant in the Facebook era.
Like their parents, teenagers and young adults know there are consequences for sharing too much online which challenges the social media platforms that have built their businesses around users spilling everything about themselves into the big data pot.
It turns out digital natives are just as conscious of the risks as their parents, although how they handle it may manifest in different ways, and the assumptions of many social media businesses aren’t quite as robust as they appeared not so long ago.
Hi Paul — yes, it’s been apparent to me for some time that the ‘kids don’t care about privacy’ is a bit of a stretch. I hear it all the time at health conferences in the context of younger citizens not being that worried about what they put online, and therefore security / privacy isn’t such a big deal to them when it comes to health records.
I see this as a big leap…while the kids are more than happy to post videos of their latest beer bonging exploits, I’m yet to come across a facebook photo gallery of a teenager’s most memorable STDs, a post announcing an adverse HIV result, or a ‘check in’ at the local abortion clinic.