I am always suspicious of Internet ‘experts’ who pay homage to the digital natives idea. The idea that young people are not only generationally different from me, but also are psychologically different.
Perhaps it’s my age. Being over-40, I react badly to anything that suggests that I’m not long from the care home. But I also genuinely believe that dividing the population up in this way is lazy, divisive and inaccurate.
The line goes that young people nowadays, having been raised on a diet of MySpace and YouTube, are careless about their privacy, are immune to advertising and share everything.
This came up in one or two sessions of the Heroes of the Mobile Screen conference on Monday.
The highlight of the day, personally, was a panel of 16–18 year-olds giving feedback to the developers of new mobile services aimed at yoof and talking about their online and mobile behaviour.
Asked about privacy, the responses were really interesting:
“I try to take non-embarrassing photos of myself. But I like to have that security — if I have a daft picture of me, I like it to be my call that it’s published somewhere than someone else’s.”
“On Facebook, you share your photos with your friends, rather than with everyone. I like that.”
“I’m on every network, and with every network you can go to your settings and change your privacy settings.”
“I’m really worried about it. Not to the point that I won’t get on every possible social networking site you can think of. But I try not to make it not about me, and about what I’m doing with the public. It’s getting a bit Big Brother kinda thing — everyone knows what you’re doing.”
“I completely agree, I think privacy is such an issue. As much as I liked Flook, that was one issue with it. There is too much exposure, and opportunity to put something up that you didn’t agree to. But it’s something we’re going to have to accept and move with, it’s part of the times. Maybe better security would help.”
“I agree. But also, y’know, you’re putting yourself out to Facebook and everyone sees your pictures. And you can make them private if you want. I know my pictures are private and only my friends can see them. It’s just something we’ve got to live with. It’s not such a big issue.”
[Thank you Mobile Entertainment, for sterling reportage].
As you can see, these teens are certainly concerned about privacy, actively curate the content and information that appears about them on the Internet, and are savvy to controls that exist to enhance their privacy. The opinions of six London teenagers hardly constitutes exhaustive research, granted. But when you hear it ‘face-to-face’ as it were, it’s a lot more compelling than seeing statistics in a survey.
If you’d like more research on this, which largely substantiates this take on teen privacy, then I recommend danah boyd’s papers. More quantatative research is available in this Pew/Internet study.
[picture credit: Shavar Ross]
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Ian, glad you like flook. When we built flook we were aware that there is a potential for misuse — just like there is with a blog, camera or even just a marker pen. From day 1 flook had a very efficient moderation system — anyone can unilaterally pull any image from the system. If you find a photo you don’t like, you immediately moderate it out of the system until we have checked out that moderation. No queue, no vote, it just disappears.
I explained this to the teens on the panel when they asked about bullying and they seemed very happy with this solution. I’m guessing they understand this area better than I do so that is a good indication for me.
That said, we’ve got quite a few users and we haven’t seen a single case of abuse so I think that there is something to be said for the fact that people are generally good and respect other people and their privacy. In the end, social services are built by their users and the flook community seems to be interested in finding cool stuff and sharing it which is perfect.
Cheers
rog
It looked like a very interesting product to me, Roger. You could describe it as an augmented reality network.
My one concern in this context is that it’s (currently) an iPhone app. Teens don’t have iPhones — and judging from the panel — don’t appear to want one.
I thought your one concern was privacy :-) Obviously we’re looking at other platforms.