The Politics Of Online Privacy
May 27th, 2010

In yesterday's blog, we touched back upon the growing popularity of using social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook to promote business. “Promoted Tweets” is slowly, but surely becoming a top choice for major corporations to advertise their brands to the youthful population of today who flock to Twitter in abundance.

Interestingly though, Martha Irvine of The Associated Press reported earlier today that young people are becoming more leery of these social networks as they tend to impede upon one's privacy. Based on a report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, it has been discovered that most users of these popular websites are most likely to limit their personal information online by implementing specific privacy settings.

Irvine cites 21-year-old Clark University student, Marlene McManus as an example. McManus continually goes through her Facebook page to remove photos that depict any of her questionable college exploits like partying and drinking. McManus has also completely dropped Twitter.

Says McManus: “I have to present a public face that doesn’t have the potential to hurt my image.” The Pew study has found that social networkers between the ages of 18 and 29 are “leading the pack in online privacy”.

As Irvine writes, this young group is “the most likely to change the privacy settings on their profiles to limit what they share with others online. The percentage who did so was 71 per cent, compared with just 55 per cent of the 50- to 64-year-old bracket. Meanwhile, about two-thirds of all social networkers who were surveyed said they’ve tightened security settings.”

In addition, the survey also found that half of the people in the 18-29 age bracket have deleted comments posted by others. This is compared to 29 per cent for those aged 30 to 49 and 26 per cent for those in the 50-64 year-old range. These numbers were close to identical for those who removed their names from photos that they were tagged in.

The Pew report also discovered that 28 per cent of the young adult group said that they never trust social networking sites compared to 20 per cent in the 30-49 bracket and 14 per cent in the 50-64 range.

According to Irvine: “The Pew report, which was released Thursday, was compiled from telephone interviews conducted by Princeton Survey Research International between Aug. 18 and Sept. 14, 2009, among a sample of 2,253 adults. The margin of error is plus or minus 2.3 percentage points.”

We will revisit this topic in tomorrow's blog.