THE TRUTH ABOUT TEENAGERS, THE INTERNET, AND PRIVACY
Did
you see that study on privacy in the digital age?
If
you're wondering which one, there's a good reason for that. Every few
months, a new study hits the press about how different generations
relate to privacy and so far, the results have been all over the map.
Last
year, USC’s Annenberg
Center for the Digital Future
released
research
showing
that younger
Internet users
are
more comfortable sharing their personal data than their older
counterparts. Commenting on the data, Jeffrey Cole, the Center’s
director, went so far as to declare,"Online privacy is
dead.” But then, a few months later, a slew of data reflected very
different results: Harris Interactive found that
the 78% of millennials expressed a wish for privacy, compared to 59%
of older internet
users.
Pew Internetalso found that
users aged 18 to 29 are more likely to have cleared their browsing
histories, disabled cookies or declined to use their real name on a
website.
So
which narrative is correct?
A
big part of the problem here is that the definition of “privacy”
is a tricky one to pin down. In many of these studies, respondents
were not asked whom they were concerned about hiding their personal
information from. Were they concerned about the government?
Corporations? People they know in real life? Ian
Miller,
who is pursuing doctoral research on the psychology of online sharing at
the University
of Toronto,
says this additional information would provide valuable context
because each generation has distinct privacy concerns. “Adolescents
consider different things to be private than adults,” he tells me.
“They don’t seem to care as much about sharing gross demographic
characteristics as older people do; they don’t take the time to
make these details like age, religion or location private on Facebook even
though they know how to.” According to Pew, the majority of teens
publicly share their real name, where they live and the school they
attend on their social channels.
But
Miller says that teens are also very savvy about hiding aspects of
their virtual lives, particularly from authority figures. “The kind
of privacy adolescents want is the same kind of privacy that they
have always wanted,” he says. “Instead of being played off
against the government or a corporation, it’s being played off
against their parents. They don’t care if Facebook knows their
religion, but they do care if their parents find out about their sex
life.” As the average age of Facebook users skews older and mom,
dad and even grandma join the site, teenagers have become highly
skilled at hiding incriminating evidence like the fact that they went
to a bar on Friday night, wore a skimpy costume to a Halloween
party,
or smoked pot that one time.
danah
boyd, a professor at Harvard
University’s Berkman Center for the Internet and
Society, argues that teenagers closely scrutinize what they share
online because it is a way for them to negotiate their changing
identities. In her book, It’s
Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens,
she describes how teenagers carefully curate their feeds based on the
audience they are trying to reach.
This
is their chance, for instance, to make a positive impression on the
cool kids at school or highlight their taste in indie music to
impress a person they have a crush on. In other words, the pressure
to create a unique identity pushes teens to disclose things publicly
that adults may choose not to.
Teenagers
are more aware of online
privacy settings than
most adults, simply because they use these tools more frequently.
“For adults, the concept of privacy tends to be more abstract; it
might have to do with general principles about one’s relationship
with the government or corporate America,” says Miller. “But
teens’ understanding of privacy is very real and concrete. They
know exactly why they need to restrict their privacy settings because
they don’t want this one friend to see this one thing.” With this
knowledge and skill comes some degree of power. While older users may
see the sharing of their information as inherently worrisome because
they do not fully understand how to control it, teenagers are quick
to learn how to use privacy settings to their best advantage.
Younger
people also tend to be less concerned with giving advertisers and
brands their data. In the Annenberg
Center’s
study, researchers found that millennials are willing to give up
personal information to brands if they receive some sort of benefit
in return. For instance, 56% of millennials were willing to share
their location with companies in order to receive coupons to nearby
businesses, versus 42% of those 35 and older. And a quarter of
millennials were willing to receive targeted ads, compared to less
than a fifth of older users. On the other end of the spectrum, some
mostly older users are highly suspicious of allowing companies to use
any of their data at all. Earlier this year, when Facebook announced
that it would target ads based on a user’s web
browsing habits,
it received criticism from organizations like the Electronic
Privacy Information Center.
But
for teens and even millennials, sharing data with companies is now
going deeper than a simple exchange of value. Young people not just
acquiescing to give their data to companies, they are actively
sharing their content with brands they like. For instance, the
fashion brand Madewell created a popular leather tote bag that has a
devoted following and women around the world have taken
pictures of themselves carrying the bag with
the hashtag #Totewell, hoping that Madewell will use it on it’s
webpage.
A
company called ThisMoment specializes in helping manage the content
that floods Twitter, Vine, Facebook, and Instagram from young people
eager to connect with companies. ThisMoment creates a dashboard for
brands like Levi’s, Sephora, and Coca-Cola to see what consumers
are posting in real time; if a brand sees a particularly great image,
it can immediately ask that user for permission to use it in its
marketing. So far, ThisMoment has seen a 70% user approval rate.
“Millennials and Gen Z (those under 19) are sharing a vast amounts
of content with brands, and this is changing the advertising
industry,”
says Vince Broady, ThisMoment’s founder and CEO. “Content from
peers and other real people is becoming an increasingly important way
for young consumers to feel connected to a brand.”
Broady
believes that brands are increasingly becoming part of the
adolescent’s process of creating their identity. “As you go down
in age, affinity to brands is very tied to values, personality and
self-expression,” he says. “When young people create something
that connects them to that brand, it is really an extension of what
they stand for so, of course, it makes sense that they want it to be
as visible as possible. This is a totally different mentality to
thinking that big bad corporations are stealing my data.” To
teenage digital natives, who have spent their lives creating
an online
persona that
is just as valuable as their real-life one, there is a psychological
payoff that comes with associating themselves with brands. This
concept may seem alien to an older generation that uses social
media not
to create their identity, but as just another communication
tool.
While
teenagers’ privacy concerns have been closely examined when it
comes to how they relate to brands and other people, experts do not
fully understand how teens feel about the government’s use of their
data. That may be because it is still a fluid situation: today’s
adolescents are growing up in the context of a national conversation
about the NSA, Edward Snowden, and spying--issues that are being
debated as I type this sentence. “It’s still unclear exactly how
these issues will impact their behavior and choices in the years to
come, but I guarantee that it will,” says Miller, of the University
of Toronto. “They’re soaking this knowledge in and living it in a
way that is very different from older generations.”
Adolescents
have been migrating away from Facebook and Twitter over the last few
years, showing preference for sites like Snapchat, Whisper, Kik, and
Secret that provide more anonymity and privacy. Part of this
transition can be explained by the fact that the older social
media sites stopped
being cool when parents joined them, but perhaps another reason could
be that teenagers growing up in the post-Snowden era implicitly
understand the value of anonymity. For teens, it’s not a matter of
which platform to use, but rather which works best in a particular
context.
BY
ELIZABETH
SEGRAN
http://www.fastcompany.com/3037962/then-and-now/the-truth-about-teenagers-the-internet-and-privacy?utm_source=mailchimp&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=fast-company-daily-manual-newsletter&position=anjali&partner=newsletter&campaign_date=11042014
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