Privacy Perception of Adolescents in a Digital World

Abstract

Privacy is a sociocultural perception, depending on the dominant values of a society, sociocultural heritage, and contemporary technological developments. This article focuses on privacy perception among adolescents based on a European school survey (PRACTIS), and presents comparative results of an exploratory study conducted among over 1,428 adolescents in six countries. The results reveal that adolescents attribute high value to privacy and are prepared to actively oppose if an online corporation is challenging their personal interests. However, they tend to trade off privacy for other perceived benefits. Adolescents’ privacy perception and data protection are affected by cultural diversity, age, gender, and most of all their various social network sites activities and their attitudes toward importance of sharing and controlling personal information.

Who Can See My Stuff? Online Self-Disclosure and Gender Differences on Facebook

“…Privacy is not an absolute but rather a subjective and contextual value, and the right to privacy is based on an array of cultural and social practices and understandings of the private sphere (Nissenbaum, 2004;Soffer & Cohen, 2014). The literature suggests that the reasons behind why some people take measures to restrict access to their information, versus the reasons why others do not, vary.…”

Privacy Attitudes and Behaviours of Autistic and Non-Autistic Teenagers on Social Networking Sites

“…People could say rude things about the picture, even though it's like a nice happy one.Nevertheless, autistic participants were not concerned about their privacy being threatened by their close friends. Much like typically developing teenagers, autistic participants trusted their friends to respect their privacy preferences.Consistent with previous studies[1,101], the non-autistic participants in our sample highly valued their privacy online. Although most were not necessarily concerned about privacy and safety threats on SNS, nearly all non-autistic participants expressed a desire to maintain some boundaries with different real or imagined audiences (refer to section 4.3.3 for more details).…”

“…In the media, teenagers are often portrayed as being apathetic to privacy risks on SNS. However, research suggests that nearly all teenagers value their privacy online [101]. Indeed, Agosto and Abbas [1] found that only 2 of the 98 teenagers in their study expressed no concerns about posting personal information online.…”

“…Although most teenagers value their privacy on SNS, they widely vary in the degree to which they are willing to trade their personal information for perceived social benefits. Soffer and Cohen [101] found that teenagers can be clustered into four groups with regards to their privacy perceptions on SNS: share their personal information without using privacy and security tools.…”

“…Overall, more than half of the participants in Soffer and Cohen's [101] sample were concerned about their privacy and security on SNS, but also prioritized self-disclosure.…”