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Teens, Social Media, and Privacy

Posted by samzenpus on from the open-book dept.

antdude writes "Pew Internet reports that: 'Teens are sharing more info about themselves on social media sites than they have in the past, but they are also taking a variety of technical and non-technical steps to manage the privacy of that information. Despite taking these privacy-protective actions, teen social media users do not express a high level of concern about third-parties (such as businesses or advertisers) accessing their data.'"

17 of 106 comments (clear)

  1. Newsflash: Teens make bad decisions by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Film at 11.

    1. Re:Newsflash: Teens make bad decisions by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I guess you're against free services then. I for one am happy for social networks and any other website to have adverts down the side of their page or a banner at the top in exchange for services I use so frequently.

    2. Re:Newsflash: Teens make bad decisions by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

      I guess you're against free services then. I for one am happy for social networks or any website to have ads down the side of the page or a banner at the top in exchange for services I use so frequently.

    3. Re:Newsflash: Teens make bad decisions by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I am against being tracked.

      So what? Just because you are against it does mean it is harmful. I am happy to be tracked, and am happy to reap the benefits of sites and ads that automatically tailor themselves to my wants. You may be happy in your paranoid little cocoon, but I don't see how you are better off in any way.

    4. Re:Newsflash: Teens make bad decisions by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I'd argue that the behavior described can't (without doing serious violence to the details) be usefully dismissed as 'making bad decisions'.

      Yes, unfortunately, Kids Today show no more signs of being Valiant Defenders of Privacy than did people yesterday. Outside of a principled-but-largely-ineffective minority, nobody ever has. Unshockingly enough, they've largely succumbed to the nigh-inevitable when it comes to advertisers and analytics creeps watching everything they do.

      On the other hand, they do appear to be taking some degree of protective action against authority figures who are overt enough to be obviously worth evading(parents, principles, coaches, etc.) and dumb enough to be evadable(If you plan on using the internet in a remotely ordinary fashion without Google, Lexis-Nexis, your friendly local telco, and possibly a three-letter-agency or two, good luck with that. If you are trying to communicate with your friends without your parents catching on to what exactly you are drinking, that's still possible).

    5. Re:Newsflash: Teens make bad decisions by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Why is it a bad decision? The more advertisers know about me, the more likely I am to see ads for things I am actually interested in.

      I do hope that none of your interests would be worth more to your insurer, potential employer, or other interested parties than they would be to doubleclick...

    6. Re:Newsflash: Teens make bad decisions by Joce640k · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Are you Scott Adams?

      You may want to form part of the matrix and let the overlords manage you, not everybody does.

      Everybody screws up when they're a teenager, it's all part of the deal.

      This is the first generation that will have all their screw-ups stored in a cross-referenced database for future reference. A database that "connected" people will be able to manipulate/edit for their own benefit.

      Not being in the database will be even worse - employers are already demanding access to people's Facebook accounts.

      --
      No sig today...
    7. Re:Newsflash: Teens make bad decisions by Razgorov+Prikazka · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Define harmful please.
      If a store owner sees me lurking around the high end laptops and comes to me to help me (and his income of course) I think that that is not 'harmful'.
      If a server is tracking my every move around the web for years on end. Not so nice. Not harmful either, but annoying... yes, certainly.
      If a company is tracking my every move around the web for years on end and sells this to who knows who, and has a 'privacy' policy of 24 pages in fontsize 5. Mmmmnot harmful in the sense that it will harm my health or quality of life, but back OFF!!
      If a company is tracking my every move around the web for years on end and sells this to my future boss who wants to inquire my personal habits. This is harmful because it might deprive me of income (and with that food, medical treatments and so on). Yes harmful.

      Privacy is not about harmful vs harmless. 25 Shades of harm I would say :-)
      A lot of us here remember the time before internet and cell phones. When I wanted to know about herpes I would go to the library and look it up in a book on STD's. No one would ever know (to a certain degree of course). Now this search queries are logged and stored and available to the highest bidder. That is a completely different story!
      The teens of today have no clue whatsoever how life would be without the web, social media, cellphones and the integration of all these. They therefore make different choices. Surprised? Not me. They have no 0. No baseline to what is intrusion and what is just fine.

      --
      rm -rf --no-preserve-root / ...and let /dev/null sort them out...
    8. Re:Newsflash: Teens make bad decisions by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I am against free services. If you are not paying for it then you are the product being sold.

    9. Re:Newsflash: Teens make bad decisions by Charliemopps · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Is that what you really think it's about? Let me tell you about a project I was involved in a while back...

      There's a website where a customer could go to, to look up information about products. These products are basically services, so you need a contract and such to get them, so after you've perused the website you're going to either need to call, or a salesman is going to have to find out who you are and call you.

      There's a vendor out there (Actually many of them) that sells a service where you install some of their software and give them various API access to your site. When someone visits the site, this software logs the session, logs EVERY bit of information about your visit and stores it. Now, keep in mind, they do not know who you are likely. You can create an account on the site and if you do they have your info, but likely they don't. There's a lot of psychological manipulation involved in getting you to log in and reveal who you are, but if you don't, that's ok to. They track your IP, your web browser, where your IP originates from, your OS, the time you spent on the site, everything you looked at, etc... from all of this they give you an ID. When you visit the next time, they know who you are... it's very accurate. I was so amazed by the process I tested it and tried to trick it. Even Tor didn't matter. It used that as a data point to identify me the next time I logged in.

      So now you're visitor 12548... but they still don't know who you are. This is where the outside vendor or "partner" comes in. They have thousands of customers. All of which have thousands or tens of thousands of hits per day. So now you go to a different site, fall for their psychological manipulation to create an account... Boom, they have your email address, possibly more if you provided your name and number. But the fact of the matter is, if they have your email address they almost assuredly have the rest of your personal info with just a few simple queries. This is all automatic, it happens very fast, all of that companies customers get relayed the data. Then this data comes in as a "Sales lead" creates a ticket and gets shipped to a salesman who calls you. Not only does the salesman have your name, number and where you work, he knows just about every site you've visited in the past 30 days that's affiliated with the company that does the data mining, and the salesman knows everything about what you've been doing on his website.

      Now he's ready to make a sales pitch and probably knows more about your habits that your wife does. Is that ok with you? Think of a financial institution that knows you've been looking for a loan to consolidate your debt... and they know all about your plans to go to Hawaii next month... or prediliction for furry porn? or anything else?

      This isn't about serving up targeted adds. If it were, it wouldn't be a problem.

    10. Re:Newsflash: Teens make bad decisions by chihowa · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You're missing something though - the fact that everyone's indiscretions will be available will mean that indiscretions will matter less.

      That doesn't really follow, though. What will happen is that we'll have a larger class of people who will never be fit for high level jobs, politics, certain professions because of their actions as teenagers. Kids in the "right" class will be taught not to make these mistakes or their parents will pay to have them properly covered up.

      Our society may talk the talk, but it isn't really tolerant of indiscretions, youthful or otherwise. In the same way, charging more and more people with felonies for minor victimless crimes doesn't make people look less harshly on felons; it just makes a larger class of unemployable felons.

      --
      If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
  2. Whew. by multiben · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'm so glad that today's social media options didn't exist when I was at school. I shudder to think of the things I would have thought would be fun to post on the internet.

    1. Re:Whew. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      ... everyone still reads today ...

      The Oak tree doesn't have his date of birth, or parent's address. Even better, no-one can pick up their phone and see the Oak tree (probably). Really great, is that no-one can search what is written on other Oak trees.

  3. Well, you got to consider his ancestors by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ShanghaiBills grandparents were last seen talking to that nice IBM census taker: "Our religion? Sure, all the better for the government to plan our future".

    1939, Germany.

    Godwin, kiss my sweaty hairy man ass.

  4. Ah youth by Krneki · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Still innocent about how morally hypocrite the adult world is.

    I envy them.

    There is nothing wrong with sharing personal information if a person desire to do so, what is wrong is the exploitation of them. This is what we should be enraged about.

    --
    Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
  5. Judgement by Waveguide04 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    There is a reason my kids dont have FB, Twitter, etc accounts. Until they know what and where to disclose info, not a bright idea to open the flood gates both inbound and outbound. Just sayin.

    1. Re:Judgement by serviscope_minor · · Score: 1, Insightful

      There is a reason my kids dont have FB, Twitter, etc accounts... ...that you know about.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.