Category Archives: Protect Yourself

There tends to be a widespread narrative that persists about teenagers when it comes to their online habits. It goes something like: Teens don’t care about their privacy online. Web giants like Google and Facebook, market research surveys, and a brief glimpse of some social networks suggest teens share information online frequently, without thought or reservation.

It’s a story that persists partly because, for companies also in the business of sharing people’s online data, the narrative that teens don’t care about their own privacy is a convenient one. Google CEO Eric Schmidt has dismissed the importance of privacy outright: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place”. Facebook president Mark Zuckerberg has described a new social norm where sharing more information openly with more people is expected. A market research survey of teens finds only 41% say they are concerned about privacy and security issues when using a mobile phone. And how else to explain sites like Dailybooth, where teens continuously snap digital self-portraits to post online – a real-time stream of faces for anyone to see?

However, as an excellent paper by danah boyd and Alice Marwick makes clear, this narrative that teens do not care about their privacy is a simplistic myth. It just isn’t true.

The draft of the article, “Social Privacy in Networked Publics: Teens’ Attitudes, Practices, and Strategies”, recently released for comment on boyd’s blog Zephoria, is a compilation of ethnographic fieldwork from 2006 through 2010. Just like Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out, boyd and Marwick’s article quotes teens in high school or who have recently dropped out. Along with the analysis by the authors, the voices of the teenagers from 20 states across the U.S. are excellent to read and hear. They’re honest. They’re smart. They’re often funny: “[My mother, on Facebook] tends to comment on everything. I’m like go away. … Everyone kind of disappears after the mom post. … And it’s just uncool having your mom all over your wall, that’s just lame.”

Right off the bat, the authors point out a truth known to anyone who’s grown up in the suburbs: IRL, few spaces or opportunities exist for teens to socialize with each other on a large scale. Too young to gather in bars, not enough ends to hang out in restaurants, surrounded by “No Loitering” signs – it’s small wonder that networked, online publics are now a core part of teen culture.

Privacy is a complicated term. As one teen defines it in the article, privacy is “for someone to respect what you do.” And there’s a paradox that boyd and Marwick highlight: Adults may worry that teens don’t care about privacy when it comes to their online activities. At the same time though, there is a belief – from parents, schools, the police – that teens are not entitled to a right of privacy in their social spaces or in their online activities.

The article goes on to describe strategies teens employ to gain some measure of privacy and control over the flow of their information. Some, like examples of social steganography, are really fascinating. “Teens want to participate in networked publics, but they also want to have control over the social situations that take place there” boyd and Marwick conclude. “They want to be visible, but only to certain people. They want to be recognized and validated, but only by certain people. This is not a contradictory stance; it parallels how people have always engaged in public spaces.”

For anyone interested in issues surrounding privacy and youth online, the article is worth a read.