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Teens Actually Care About Online Privacy
CowboyRobot writes "According to a new report by Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, more than half of American teenagers have steered clear of a mobile app due to worries about privacy. Some 56 percent of younger teens (ages 12 to 14) who use mobile apps avoid some apps after learning they had to share personal information to use it, while 49 percent of older teens (14 to 17) have. Also, teens who had at some point sought outside advice about privacy management were considerably more likely than those who had not sought advice to say that they had disabled location tracking features."
Just saying, slight bias in their conclusion.
I'm happy with half. Most people are idiots. Nearly half of any group not being a total idiot has to count as a win.
Never really could reconcile this generation's seemingly blase attitude towards anonymity with my own generation's take on the internet. I was a teen when the internet became A Thing, and all us kids were completely fucking enamored with the anonymity. A place where we weren't judged by our age, merely by our worth? FUCKIN' A! Perfect!
Did they weigh that variable at all against what percentage of their peers used the app? To what extent do kids care about privacy in the face of peer pressure?
Facebook demands substantial personal information about you, but last I checked, it's still the most popular social networking app kids use.
I'm mostly unimpressed by the twee nonsense about kids these days being 'digital natives' or something, imbued with mysterious computer-using powers (sure, kids these days are almost all users, unlike older age brackets that have holdouts; but the bar is not high for 'using technology', thanks to years of dedicated UI polishing and idiot-proofing, so only the usual much smaller percentage of nerds have any reason to go beyond trivial levels of knowledge); but it seems perfectly reasonable that they'd be a relatively privacy-conscious group.
After all, kids are among the demographics most likely to be surveilled and to be punished or otherwise restricted based on that surveillance. Parents, teachers/admins, peers, present or near-future employers and college admissions officers, cops (whether they just come and break up that party you foolishly put on facebook or whether you are already familiar with being stop-and-frisked depends on other demographic variables, of course), all actively watching and frequently acting on that.
Adults are still pretty heavily watched; but the range of banal behavior they can engage in without consequence is substantially greater.
It only takes participation in one of these invasive networks to lose your privacy. 'apps', facebook, whatever.. it's all the same. The only winning move is not to play.
of the reddit "enhancement" suite upgrade because it suddenly wanted access to history and tabs.
Been using it for a while until then, but now I dropped it. So it happens.
... most kids are tech illiterate. To have any real privacy you have to understand the technology and what it's implications are and most average people will never grasp how easy it is for people to get your information if you use any technology at all.
In human terms a generation is around plus twenty years. The internet about twenty years ago didn't have Google or Facebook. On /. the big concern was how completely insecure windows 95 was. There was a bit of chatter about privacy but it wasn't front and centre. The next generation has grown up on the internet and with social networking. It may be privacy will become the next way to show how cool you are. Who knows, crazy kids.... we can only hope.
Welcome to the wonderful world of ageism, where anyone more than ten years younger than you is automatically an ignorant, lazy degenerate with no future! Please line up under the sign with the year of your birth so you can receive a bag of nostalgic items from your childhood, to further cement your prejudices about people you've never gotten to know and don't understand, and to ensure fully that the rosy tint of memory prevents you from remembering how you actually were as a person at that age, and thus from empathising with any children or teenagers.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
They care about it because Google's app store shows them what permissions the app requires, then they jump to shortsighted conclusions. I once had someone email me some insulting words because my application kept track of the phone state in an attempt to reconnect gracefully after a call on CDMA carries. I guarantee the ~50% of teenagers who have not used an app because of privacy concerns have a Facebook account.