“Don’t be dumb—that’s the rule I try to live by”: A closer look at older teens’ online privacy and safety attitudes

Abstract

Popular media often characterize youths’ use of social media as overwhelmingly negative, reporting that teens engage in reckless, unsafe behaviors with little thought to their online privacy or safety. Typically, these popular media accounts are based on adults’ prescriptive views of youths’ attitudes and behaviors. Using qualitative methods including background questionnaires and focus groups, we gathered older teens’ attitudes about online privacy and safety to provide a more complete narrative from a teen perspective. Findings suggest that older teens are concerned with their online privacy and feel discomfort with unintended audiences seeing their personal information, yet most feel tension to share personal information with friends. They are less concerned about safety, tending to feel safe online and to employ protective measures, but viewing older and younger generations as less knowledgeable about online safety. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings for teaching teens about online privacy and safety.

Comfortably Numb

“…As has been previously observed [1,21] social media platform users tend to show a general acceptance of the commercial nature of social media platforms. While they might not like it they accept a certain level of personal data trade as a price to be paid to use these services.…”

“…There is a lot of concern about teens and their social media practices -as well as worry about their attitudes towards data disclosure and privacy [1,8,32]. However, most of the research has focused on interpersonal concerns in the use of social media [16,22,26,29], considering teen strategies for information management and disclosure to their friends, parents, teachers or strangers [40,41].…”

“…Yet interpersonal privacy is not the only aspect of online self-disclosure that must be addressed. After all, by engaging with online social media platforms, teens, along with everyone else, are expected to make decisions about what data they are disclosing [1]. Managing online privacy is more than taking care to ensure that parents, friends and strangers can only see the content teens want them to see [26,27].…”

Awareness of eSafety and Potential Online Dangers among Children and Teenagers

“…Children and teenagers spoke of how their feelings regarding exposure online have changed, phrases such as "I've got used to being exposed" were repeated again and again, as if there were no choice, because these are "the rules of the game." They complained about the ease with which they were snubbed, humiliated, or offended (Agosto, & Abbas, 2015;Bonanno & Hymel, 2013;Clark, 2013;Duerager & Livingstone, 2012;Lim, 2016;Livingstone, 2013;Livingstone & Bober, 2005;Livingstone, Marsh, Plowman, Ottovordemgentschenfelde, & Fletcher-Watson, 2015;Nosko et al, 2010;Ofcom, 2010Ofcom, , 2016Taylor & Kitter, 2010;Zilka, 2014Zilka, , 2016b.…”

Aging Agents: Cross Generational Analysis of Behavior and Need Satisfaction Among Players of Tom Clancy’s The Division 2

“…As we have shown, higher scores of narrative presence and NPC Closeness may be a signal that the older adults prefer story-based games which are usually played individually. Another explanation might be the lack of technological familiarity (IJsselsteijn et al 2007) or reluctance to engage with online communications due to safety risks (Agosto and Abbas 2017). Future studies may explore this emerging pattern to examine its generalizability to other games and what it implies for game development targeting older adults.…”