Maintaining Privacy on Facebook

I Always Feel Like Somebody’s Watching Me: Teens, Facebook, and Privacy

If parents feel like all teens are on Facebook, they’re not far from wrong.  With over 500 million active adult and youth users worldwide[1], the social networking behemoth has a strong hold on teens. Amazingly, almost three in four youth ages 12–17 are on a social networking site.

To be sure, Facebook has had its share of privacy issues over the past two years. It has an opaque privacy policy, which requires members to opt out (instead of opt in) or to purposefully restrict their information to keep it from being shared.  Also, when you delete content on your profile, it may still be accessible on other people’s profiles until they delete it.

Maybe this is why when parents think of teens online, they do so with concern about their assumed naiveté about privacy. “Teens just don’t think,” the conventional wisdom goes.  But the reality is that most teens do think about privacy—maybe even more so than adults.  According to a recent Pew study, 66% of teens restrict access to information in their profiles— this is in comparison to 60% of adults![2] In fact, only 6% of teens make their first and last name publicly accessible on social networks.”[3]

So, if the majority of teens are generally doing a good job, what exactly are the privacy issues? They include friends, or friends of friends misinterpreting what’s on their profile and acting out; identity theft; receiving unwanted messages that are sexual or harassing in nature; and college admissions or future employers seeing old posts and embarrassing pictures.

The good news is: Many teens have developed sophisticated strategies in addition to simply setting their profile to “private” to ensure they are protected. Dr. danah boyd, a Fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, has talked to teens all over the United States.  She has several reassuring examples of teen self-protection on her blog.  For example, a teen named Mikalah “uses Facebook but when she goes to log out, she deactivates her Facebook account.”[4] She’s not trying to delete her account, just trying to keep her account from having any online presence when she’s not there.  Having her account activated only when she’s using Facebook means that she’ll see anything posted to it right away. Also importantly, her account is invisible when she’s not there. This means that she can’t be found in a search. Her friends will see her account when she reactivates it.

Another teen, Leah, said that her mother gave her the useful tip not to reveal anything personal, like her street address, pictures of the inside of her home, and when she would be away. She also doesn’t accept friend invites from people she doesn’t know.

Shamika uses text messaging to keep in touch with her close friends but keeps a Facebook profile to maintain a social presence. Rather than deactivating her profile like Mikalah, she deletes everything after it’s been posted—“every wall message, status update, and Like.”[5] When Dr. boyd asked why, Shamika talked about how “people were nosy and it was too easy to get into trouble for the things you wrote awhile back that you couldn’t even remember posting let alone remember what it was all about.”

Adam, who has over 300 friends on Facebook says that it’s too hard to keep track of all the drama that’s going on. His motto is to never say anything bad about anyone and delete comments that do!

Parents may wonder: Why do teens even have a Facebook profile if they feel the need to sometimes go to extreme lengths to protect their privacy? Teens (and adults!) feel that Facebook is a necessary part of being social, connecting with people they care about, and expressing important pieces of who they are. Some teens use Facebook just to stay in touch with acquaintances or to keep up with what’s going on in their social group or school. Other teens don’t make a distinction between their online and offline selves: Facebook is just another venue for self-expression, hence the highly personalized profile.

So, what to do if you’re a parent of a teenager who wants to be on Facebook (or whatever the new thing is)? Help them find ways to express themselves and yet be safe while doing so. Talk to your teens about why they want a profile; what they expect to share on it; and what their strategies are for privacy.  If you’re having trouble starting the conversation, some of the teens’ strategies listed here may be a good place to begin.

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