A few years ago, before DVD players supplanted VCRs, the safest bet, if you wanted to operate or program a video recorder, was to point the nearest child at it. Similarly, my children can already type faster and more accurately than I was able to at their age... and if I weren't in the IT industry, they would almost certainly be more computer-literate than me in every respect, instead of just in some.
But is that true across the board? Are we bringing up a generation of children who are not just computer literate, but "PII literate" (Personally Identifiable Information)? There's been some research recently, but the picture it paints is confusing. For instance, children and their parents express different views about whether the children have been set rules to guide their online behaviour (two thirds of parents assert that they have, while only half the children concur).
Anecdotally, young people these days are more comfortable with the notion of having multiple online personas - though (equally anecdotally) that most often takes the form of discarding one account and starting a new one, rather than maintaining multiple concurrent accounts specifically to achieve some kind of social 'watertight compartments'. The present article cites Dana [sic] Boyd's 2007 paper "Why Youth <3 Social Network Sites" as noting that some teenage users were entering false name/location details, restricting access, or setting up multiple social networking pages... not to protect against strangers, but to maintain a space from which their parents were excluded.
Ofcom's director of market research is quoted as saying that "people put aside concerns about privacy and safety believing they have been taken care of by someone else". I suspect this applies in several ways:
- children perhaps assume that their parents wouldn't knowingly let them do something unsafe;
- parents perhaps assume their children wouldn't do something foolish;
- both perhaps assume that social networking sites wouldn't either deliberately abuse their PII, or make the default disclosure settings inappropriately lax.
I suspect it's simply not enough to warn children of the risks of disclosing too much personal data online; there are too many factors which will outweigh the advice:
- it comes from a stuffy old parent, who doesn't even know what Facebook is, and doesn't have any friends anyway (cause or effect...? You figure it out, old-timer...)
- the risks which may arise from over-disclosure are probably remote in the imagination of the user
- 'this is my private space with my friends, so we can do what we want here'.
In other words, we're almost certainly not currently creating a generation of PII-literate data subjects - only adverse experience is likely to do that.
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I'd say these kids sound fairly aware of their privacy, and I'd bet (research anyone?) they're doing a lot of lying to social networking applications to protect it--which (if true) also means effectively denying much of their PII to those applications.
Posted by John A Arkansawyer on April 09, 2008 at 02:48 AM GMT+00:00 #