Adults warn kids off social network sites, use them themselves -- Pew Internet report on search and identity

The excellent Pew and Internet Life project has just released its latest report, "Digital Footprints: Online identity management and search in the age of transparency," filled with meaty data on the way that we're using the net to manage and create our identities. As danah boyd points out, one conclusion really stands out: grownups are much more likely to have a public social networking profile on sites like Facebook than kids are, and are incredibly sanguine about the possibility of having their identities breached through these services. As danah says, "In other words, adults (and presumably there are parents in this group) are telling teens to be careful online and restrict what information they put up there while they themselves are doing little to protect their own data."

Internet users are becoming more aware of their digital footprint; 47% have searched for information about themselves online, up from just 22% five years ago. However, few monitor their online presence with great regularity. Just 3% of self-searchers report that they make a regular habit of it and 74% have checked up on their digital footprints only once or twice.

Indeed, most internet users are not concerned about the amount of information available about them online, and most do not take steps to limit that information. Fully 60% of internet users say they are not worried about how much information is available about them online. Similarly, the majority of online adults (61%) do not feel compelled to limit the amount of information that can be found about them online.

Link

• [Halloween Jack]

  I was born in 1964, Charlie.

• [Charlie Summers]

  That’s not the point of the article. It notes that those of us of more mature years warn you youngsters about posting unnecessary and personally-identifiable information to your accounts on Facebook, MySpace, or even the profile section on this website, and then go along posting that same information ourselves on our accounts on the above. While I am personally careful about what I post to external websites and despise the lack of privacy data mining has wrought, I probably have way too much information posted about myself on my own blog, so I suppose even I am somewhat hypocritical

  This isn’t exactly a surprise, either, since those of us born in the 1950s are likely not strangers to external chemical influences, yet routinely shout, “Just say no!” The “do as I say, not as I do” form of parenting has been around as long as there have been parents…but for whatever it’s worth, at least some of it is an attempt at keeping you from making the same stupid mistakes we did. Go out and make your own. ;)

• [Michael]

  I don’t see the point in hiding online — the only time I’ve worried about it was while doing serious antispamming, and then only one frisson and one weird phone call.

  But then I suppose Googling on “Michael Roberts” isn’t going to get you much closer to me anyway, ha. And the address you find is wrong. Nowadays I don’t even worry about picking fights online with rednecks, because it’s really hard to load up the pickup and drive to Puerto Rico to set fire to my house. Which is concrete, anyway.

  For a while I did obsess a little about my kids giving out personal info, it’s true. Lately I don’t worry too much about that, either. There are plenty of other kids online to steal.

• [Halloween Jack]

  I can completely believe this, seeing as how would-be molesters get caught by sting operations: they give out their personal information and go for meet-ups to fake “teens” with pretty flimsy false identities. These are people that know that they’re breaking the law, and yet they’re not all that careful.