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Teens Actually Care About Online Privacy

Posted by timothy on from the contrary-to-popular-belief dept.

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."

7 of 93 comments (clear)

  1. I care deeply for privacy if it drains my battery by recrudescence · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Just saying, slight bias in their conclusion.

  2. Good to hear! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!

  3. Logical enough... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Logical enough... by Seumas · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Exactly this. The media puts out this idea that because kids use more technology than kids of any other generation, it somehow equates to them being more technologically capable. I'm sorry, but kids using an iPad to play a game or their PC for twitter and WoW are not the same thing as kids knowing how a computer works, how to setup a router, debugging networking issues, writing code, and so on.

      Further, I do not believe that most kids give a fuck about privacy, because their actions don't follow that claim. Further, these are the same age groups that were polled a few years ago and said they felt that the press had too much free speech and the government should do something about it.

      That said, it has become trendy (thanks to reddit) for young people to suddenly give a fuck about things like their privacy. So . . . I guess there's that.

  4. so? by epyT-R · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  5. Just steered clear by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  6. Yeah, sure... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.