Teens, Social Media, and Privacy

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.'"

Comments

Newsflash: Teens make bad decisions

[Anonymous Coward]

Film at 11.

Re:Newsflash: Teens make bad decisions

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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...

Re:Newsflash: Teens make bad decisions

[Joce640k]

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.

Re:Newsflash: Teens make bad decisions

[Razgorov Prikazka]

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.

Re:Newsflash: Teens make bad decisions

[chihowa]

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.

Whew.

[multiben]

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.

Ah youth

[Krneki]

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.