Teens and privacy online: why using Facebook doesn't mean you don't value privacy

Microsoft Research Group researchers danah boyd and Alice Marwick have posted a draft paper entitled "Social Privacy in Networked Publics: Teens' Attitudes, Practices, and Strategies" that reports on fieldwork interviewing teenagers about how they view privacy. It rebuts the cynical, easy dismissal of online privacy issues that says that kids don't care about privacy because they put their lives on Facebook; instead, it provides compelling testament from everyday kids that their use of Facebook and other social networks is governed by privacy norms because kids can't influence privacy laws or privacy code or privacy markets. In other words, kids have definite ideas about privacy, but limited power to put those ideas into practice.

Another dynamic that teens must navigate is the commonplace collapsing of social contexts. While countless movies have been made about situations where contexts collide in everyday life - e.g. running into your ex when out on a date - these are considered exceptional moments. Yet, in networked publics, it is exceptionally difficult to separate contexts. The flattening of diverse social relationships into a monolithic group of "Friends" makes it difficult for users to negotiate the normal variances of self-­‐presentation that occur in day-­‐to-­‐day life. Social media participants regularly lament moments where worlds collide.27

A third dynamic brought on by the technological affordances common to networked publics has to do with the blurring of what is public and what is private. As social constructs, privacy and publicity are affected by what is structurally feasible and socially appropriate. In recent history, privacy was often taken for granted because structural conditions made it easier to not share than to share. Social media has changed the equation.

In unmediated interactions, we assume a certain amount of privacy simply because it takes effort to publicize interactions. When we share updates about our lives over coffee, we don't expect our interlocutors to share them widely, because 1) we don't believe that said information is interesting enough to be spread widely; 2) it's difficult to disseminate social information to a large audience in face-­‐to-­‐face contexts; and 3) recording a conversation or sharing every detail of an interaction would violate both social norms and the trust assumed in a relationship. If we do believe that our interlocutor might be interested in sharing what we said, we explicitly state that the interaction is private and expect the social norms around the conversation to triumph.28 And if our interlocutor wants to publicize every detail, it is assumed that this intention will be announced (e.g., a journalist interviewing an expert). Furthermore, people who are likely to share as much as they can remember are often labeled as "gossips" - often because they initially violated the social norms around sharing and are no longer trusted.

How Teens Understand Privacy

• [wobinidan]

  No one uses their real name on 4chan, or boingboing, or youtube. Yet, the vast majority of people on facebook use their real name for some reason. That alone suggests an inherent trust of a company whose only interest is in selling your details to the highest bidder.

  I use facebook, but I am not as naive as all of my facebook friends. I don’t have anything to hide, but nor do I have anything to share with a company that has no interest in protecting me, regularly changes it’s privacy settings and is desperate to sell as much information as possible to justify it’s ridiculous value.

  As for google, they’ve recently shut down one of my email accounts for some non-existant ‘suspicious activity’ that presumably means spamming, when I had done no such thing. But they offered me a chance to re-open my account by giving them my phone number and sending me a text.

  Well, I’d rather see my account closed forever than give a faceless corporation in another country my phone number. We are supposed to watch out for phishing, unless it’s from a famous website, in which case we are supposed to go along with it.

  F that.

  • [pauldavis]

    No one uses their real name on 4chan, or boingboing, or youtube.

    Need I go on?

  • [travtastic]

    Wouldn’t it be weird if my full name was Trav Tastic?

  • [peterbruells]

    Speak for yourself. I’m posting by my real name everywhere.

    And, nicks aside, will assume that many of those who don’t, are too cowardly to do so.

    Cowardly meaning that they have no rational reason to fear real repercussions. I’m not talking Chinese dissidents or transsexuals in the bible belt or homosexual youths in small German towns. of course.

• [Crispian]

  Mildly interesting bit of intellectual masturbation, but I think the premise is flawed. Of course teens value privacy. I suspect that when someone asserts otherwise, they are merely being inartful.

  Teens do not understand the limitations of “privacy norms” and the full implications of sharing certain information within those norms online. When a teen girl shares risque pictures, is she merely hampered by her inability to “influence privacy laws or privacy code or privacy markets”? When she regurgitates every private thought and feeling to her “friends” is the problem a lack of political power? Teens do expect a certain amount of privacy in these situations. That expectation is simply unrealistic.

  It also cannot be denied that there is a not insignificant minority of young people who do not value their privacy. They want to be stars. They want attention. And the internet affords them that hope.

  There is a difference between teens and adults. Anon #3 makes a good point: “You can care about something while ignoring threats to it or lack of it.” Adults appreciate that threat more than teens (see Anon #2).

• [yrarbil cilbup]

  Apologist piece, the poor little twerps can’t make a hard decision like forgo Farcebook, cause everyone is doing it. They can not comprehend never being part of the herd.

  Stop using Farcebook, problem solved.

  • [Anonymous]

    I don’t use Facebook. I miss out on a lot of events because of it, and I can forgive people for feeling pressured into making the other choice. I know simply judging is easier, but you could try to understand other people’s perspectives.

• [redstarr]

  I really found the part about the teen public spaces changing interesting. The idea that teens are using online spaces as the place they gather was intriguing to me. We adults felt kind of the same about privacy in actual places like parties and the mall and pool halls and arcades and parking lots and such as teens today do about places like facebook. I’ve noticed that my friends’ teenage kids don’t go out together in the same ways we did. They are more likely to be on facebook on a Saturday night than they are to be at the mall or hanging out in their cars parked in a parking lot on the main drag. I know lots of parents that wouldn’t allow their teens to go a lot of the places we hung out with other teens and little to no adult supervision. It makes sense that they’re still in need of that kind of place to go and socialize with each other and flirt and fight and see and be seen, but they don’t have access to “real” spaces we had at their age. And some of the same behaviors they have in the “privacy” of facebook are the things we did in the adult-free zones we had at their age.

  I think what makes it a bigger concern is the documented proof aspect and the indestructible aspect of the internet versus doing stuff in real places. Sure, I knew that our buddy’s mom could drive down the street and see me in a skimpy tank top and shorty shorts sitting on the hood of a friends car smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer in the local loitering parking lot. It wasn’t truly “private”, but if she wanted to talk about it at the grocery store with my mom, there was a sense of plausible deniability. Maybe my mom might not believe her and that she’d be unlikely to prove it either way. But if a teen were to post a pic of themselves in the same outfit drinking and smoking a cigarette today and their buddy’s mom ran across it on facebook, there’d be no doubt about it when their mom was forwarded the link.

  And that my scantily car hood smoking adventures aren’t going to be googleable forever makes a world of difference. My customers can’t type my name into a search engine years and years later and see me in acid wash cut-off jeans and a glorified bra making out behind the movie theatre or see that I got in a scuffle with the girl who’s boyfriend I was back there with. That’s a luxury the online no-grown ups space doesn’t allow for. These kids are going to be middle-aged and their search results will still include flirty pics from when they were kids and the discussion where they were called a “filthy slut” for flirting with someone else’s high school boyfriend is searchable and archived forever.

• [redstarr]

  But I guess the positive in the trade-off is that online stuff doesn’t have some of the real consequences real world stuff did. Sure, a kid’s online sting of insults during a puppy-lovers quarrel is going to be out there forever, but they aren’t going to get in an actually fist fight over it like I did. My low cut top and a bottle of vodka memory isn’t going to be viewable by my grandkids like the one today’s teens could post, but they aren’t at the same risk of getting hot and heavy in the backseat with the boys that shirt got attention from or getting a real hangover or DUI from that vodka. No one is going to pass them any drugs through the computer screen. No one is going to get pregnant at home with a laptop. The kids that are posting stuff are posting in a grown-up free environment in their heads, but in the real world, their real bodies are safe and sound in mom and dad’s house.

• [Chevan]

  My rule of thumb is that information that someone could gain by coincidentally sitting next to me in a public place and overhearing a conversation I’m having isn’t information worth protecting.

  I would suspect that a fair number of teens today have similar rules, albeit not expressed in words.

  I DO care about privacy, but my concern starts before any information leaves my mouth, not before I need to decide whether something belongs on Facebook.

• [John Farrier]

  For years, I’ve simply assumed that everything that I write online will be read by everyone, forever.

• [Anonymous]

  I don’t understand why everyone always seems to assume that teens are unsophisticated enough not to separate “friends” on facebook from their actual friends. Most of the people i know have been doing exactly this for years, a “facebook friend” /= an actual friend.

• [Anonymous]

  Social media participants regularly lament moments where worlds collide. As in “ZOMG, my (teachers/parents/college application officers/prospective employers) have been reading my (facebook/livejournal/blog)! That is so wrong! Don’t the need a a warrant?”

  • [Anonymous]

    rebuts the cynical, easy dismissal of online privacy issues that says that kids don’t care about privacy because they put their lives on Facebook…

    And yet it only took to the second comment before people started the cynical, easy dismissal of online privacy issues that says kids don’t care about privacy because they put their lives on Facebook. Nice, commenters.

• [Anonymous]

  You can care about something while ignoring threats to it or lack of it. Privacy is a perfect example of this.

• [Mr. Winka]

  “kids can’t influence privacy laws or privacy code or privacy markets. In other words, kids have definite ideas about privacy, but limited power to put those ideas into practice.”

  Like many others, I stopped using Facebook when they slimed up their privacy policy. Kids also have this power to give the finger to big companies. I still have people ask me to use Facebook which is a good opportunity for me to let them know that Facebook is not trustworthy and shouldn’t be used.

• [SedanChair]

  “In recent history, privacy was often taken for granted because structural conditions made it easier to not share than to share. Social media has changed the equation.”

  No, it’s still easier not to share. If there’s something you’d prefer the whole world not to know about, don’t put it on Facebook! Revolutionary.

  “The flattening of diverse social relationships into a monolithic group of “Friends” makes it difficult for users to negotiate the normal variances of self-­‐presentation that occur in day-­‐to-­‐day life.”

  Sorry, don’t buy it. The paradigm you’re insisting is so new isn’t at all–ever heard of Christmas cardS? You send the same message to a large group of people. We’ve all got the aunt that sends us a 13-page screed against Obama every year…overshare and inappropriate boundaries weren’t invented by Facebook.

  • [AnthonyC]

    Possibility is not the same as ease.

    Also, *I* am not the only person with the ability to put things about me online. That aunt may have included a photo of her family in her mass Christmas cards, but not a hundred photos of her extended social network in compromising situations, taken discreetly using a device she always keeps in her pocket that no one around her would think twice about.

  • [HereticGestalt]

    So, social networks aren’t anything structurally novel or interesting…because you covered this ground generations ago with mass Christmas cards? Let’s stop and take a moment to meditate on the complete absurdity of that statement.

    I suppose it isn’t nice to make fun of you – was that the product of what they call a “senior moment”?

    • [SedanChair]

      Oh ho ho, those old people with their useless antiquated ideas! (I was born during the Carter administration).

      A Christmas card list *is* a social network. Way to miss the point. If you can’t see the parallel then I’d say you’re being willfully obtuse. My point was that there are in fact precedents in our society for the management of personal mass communication. The fact that a platform exists where you can share anything you want to does not affect *what* you have to share.

      • [JohnnyOC]

        “The fact that a platform exists where you can share anything you want to does not affect *what* you have to share.”

        Unless of course it shares information on the platform that you do not want to share and the off switch is actually “on” as default and to shut it off you have to tell the card company to stop.

        It’s like if your Christmas Card had a speaker and started to spout that you are playing Farmville to everyone you sent those cards to besides wishing a Merry Christmas.

        Also, Hallmark is making money from the card you sent but they don’t have targeted ads on the back of the cards of golf clubs since you can’t opt out of having them looking through your other mail.

  • [Antinous / Moderator]

    The paradigm you’re insisting is so new isn’t at all–ever heard of Christmas cardS? You send the same message to a large group of people. We’ve all got the aunt that sends us a 13-page screed against Obama every year…overshare and inappropriate boundaries weren’t invented by Facebook.

    A friend was complaining that she had to individually tell me what was happening in her life because I’m not on FB. My first thought was the mimeographed Xmas letter. But then I realized that batch processing was a better analogy.

    • [travtastic]

      It must be so annoying to have to talk to people!

• [Flying_Monkey]

  You may be interested that danah boyd is also one of four respondants to Colin Bennett’s piece, ‘In Defence of Privacy’, in the new issue of Surveillance & Society:
  http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/ojs/index.php/journal/issue/current

• [Jefferson75]

  danah boyd gave this talk at UMD’s Theorizing the Web seminar in DC last month. It was a good conference, and I think that they will put it on again next year.

  If someone knows a better submission process to get the word to BoingBoing, I’ll try to let everyone know again next year. Didn’t seem to make it last time around.

  The audio of the talk and following Q/A are available online.
  http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/04/11/audio-from-danah-boyds-ttw2011-keynote/