Teens, sharing more online, increasingly aware of maintaining privacy

Teens are sharing more personal information than ever but have also become increasingly savvy about keeping information private, an important aspect of one’s online presence, a recent study by Pew Internet found. 

According to the study, “teens are cognizant of their online reputations, and take steps to curate the content and appearance of their social media presence.” 

Most teens are actively cleaning their profiles. Some 59 percent have deleted or edited something they’ve posted, 53 percent have deleted other’s comments on their profile, and 31 percent have deactivated a profile altogether, the study found.

Though helpful, deleting posts and restricting access to social media profiles don’t satisfy all privacy for some teens said Katjana Jin, a 15-year-old high school student. She and her friends share increasingly more of their personal information on the web through social media, but use a variety of techniques to keep that information private.

“Teenagers just know how to have this coded language and make things really vague,” Jin said.

Danah Boyd, a research assistant professor in Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, said this practice is common among people who want to or must keep their posts secure.

“It’s a practice we see whenever there is a difference in power, so you often see this in political situations. We talk about it a lot in, for example, China about dissidents actually using a lot of encoding to deal with the fact they’re used to the state surveiling them,” Boyd said. “Young people are doing the same thing because they are used to a way of people looking in — whether it’s people within their classmates or peers or whether we’re talking about parents or adults.”

Boyd said that although teens are improving “neither adults nor young people are really clued into the details of data privacy, the ability to control the data as it flows.”

Jin said she’s a common user of Snapchat, a photo-sharing app that deletes photos a few seconds after sharing that owes its popularity to the sense of security users feel when using it. While the app is secure for the average user, it has been proven to still be vulnerable.

Teens are “sophisticated” and doing their best to utilize the new technologies as they come out while retaining a level of privacy, Boyd said.

“Young people are actually trying to participate in public life but that does not mean they want to be public, Boyd said, “They’re not putting everything out there for people to see.”