Do Young People Care About Privacy Online?
There’s often talk about how young people don’t care about their privacy, especially online.
But recent papers from Harvard, Berkeley and University of Pennsylvania researchers show that kids and young adults do want to keep information private. They just aren’t as savvy about privacy laws, and kids and teens in particular are concerned about a specific type of privacy — namely whether parents, teachers and other adults are viewing their information.
Both sets of researchers found that young people’s values are similar to those of older adults when it comes to privacy.
“In most cases young people think very much the same as older people when it comes to online,” said John Palfrey, a professor at Harvard Law School and an author of the paper from Harvard, which reviewed data collected in studies of children and teens online from the 1990s through this year. “Many of the mistakes that young people make are the mistakes older people make. The information young people share on Facebook, for example, is very similar to the amount of information shared on dating sites by adults.”
Subscribe