Pew Internet & American Life Project
Teens, Privacy & Online Social Networks
Managing online identities and personal information in the age of MySpace
Much of the media coverage surrounding young people and online social networks has focused on the personal information teens make available on these internet spaces, where users can create a profile and connect that profile to others to create a personal network. Are teenagers sharing information that will harm their future college or job prospects? Or worse, are they sharing information that puts them at risk of victimization?
A new survey and a series of focus groups conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project explore questions of teen online privacy protection from several perspectives: by looking at the choices that teens make to share or not to share information online, by examining what they share, by probing for the context in which they share it and by asking teens for their own assessment of their vulnerability.
For many online teens, particularly those with profiles, privacy and disclosure choices are made as they create and maintain social networking profiles. Of course, material shared in a profile is just one of many places where information is shared online, but it provides a useful snapshot of the decisions that teens make about what to share in a relatively public and persistent online environment. The study also examined the interactions teens have with people unknown to them on social networking sites, exploring the nature of new friendships created on the networks, as well as unwelcome, and sometimes uncomfortable or even scary contacts with strangers.
Most teenagers are taking steps to protect themselves online from the most obvious areas of risk. The new survey shows that many youth actively manage their personal information as they perform a balancing act between keeping some important pieces of information confined to their network of trusted friends and, at the same time, participating in the exciting process of creating content for their profiles and making new friends.
Still, the survey also suggests that today's teens face potential risks associated with online life. Some 32% of online teenagers (and 43% of social-networking teens) have been contacted online by complete strangers and 17% of online teens (31% of social networking teens) have "friends" on their social network profile whom they have never personally met.
Here is a general statistical snapshot of how teens use social network sites and the way they handle their privacy on them:
- 55% of online teens have profiles online; 45% of online teens do not.
- Among the teens who have profiles, 66% say they limit access to their profile in some way so that it is not visible to all internet users.
- Among those whose profiles can be accessed by anyone online, 46% say they give at least a little and sometimes a good deal of false information on their profiles. Teens post fake information to protect themselves, but also to be playful or silly.
- Most teens are using networks to stay in touch with people they already know, either friends that they see a lot (91% of social networking teens have done this) or friends that they rarely see in person (82%).
- 49% of social network users say they use the networks to make new friends.
- 32% of online teens have been contacted by strangers online - this could be any kind of online contact, not necessarily contact through social network sites.
- 7% of online teens and 21% of teens who have been contacted by strangers have engaged an online stranger to find out more information about that person.
- 7% of online teens and 23% of teens who have been contacted by a stranger online say they felt scared or uncomfortable because of the online encounter.