Do teenagers actually care about online privacy?

After a number of tragic cases of social media misuse hitting the headlines, GfK’s Colin Strong looks at new research that sheds light on how young people engage online – and offers advice to brands so they can help operate responsibly.

Scarcely a week goes by without news headlines announcing another teenager has disclosed information about themselves online with unexpected and often disastrous consequences.

Paris Brown felt obliged to resign as Kent’s first youth crime commissioner after some ill-advised tweets she had made some years previously. More recently we had the tragic news of Daniel Perry taking his life after apparently being blackmailed over some footage of himself recorded online.

Whilst these are perhaps the more extreme examples, many of us with teenage children in our families are aware of instances where they have not appeared to exercise sufficient concern for their privacy.

So it is perhaps unsurprising that there is a widespread belief that teenagers don’t care about privacy. Indeed, why would so many of them share so much intimate information about themselves online if this was not the case? But research undertaken by GfK suggests that teenagers do typically consider privacy to be important and will often go to great lengths to manage it effectively.

Navigating your teenage life in the context of social media is still relatively new so its not a surprise that these issues are arising. For those of us that have not grown up socialising online it can seem like a fairly alien concept that this is the place that teens hang-out. But it’s socially critical for teens to be on social network sites in order to properly participate in teen culture.

Teens use them as an opportunity to socialise with a range of people, just as a previous generation may have done in the informal meeting spaces in their towns and shopping centres. But how well do many of us, not having grown up with this, actually understand the issues? And even if you have, then to what extent are you up on the latest rapidly emerging social networks that inevitably change the landscape?

What’s perhaps not really recognised and understood in the midst of the debate is that within these environments teenagers are using a variety of techniques to manage their boundaries, often in a very sophisticated and nuanced manner.

For example, many teens that we spoke to in our research actually thought carefully about what they put online and would often encode their messages in an intentionally vague way (the term is ‘Vaguebooking’) so that only those ‘in the know’ would understand the point of what was being said.

And many would also segregate their peer group and their behaviours through the use of different social networks. Twitter was often judged to be the space where teens could better express themselves as the interpersonal transactions were apparently more ephemeral.

Whilst a Facebook update could be commented on and criticised, a tweet is often considered more transient and conversational, thus less likely to attract the scorn of your peers. But also different people use different networks – fewer people use Instagram and Snapchat for example, allowing teens to be more selective about what they are sharing with whom.

But what about the controls that are in place? Are these sufficiently comprehensive and do they allow teens to manage their privacy effectively? Most teens did indeed feel confident that they understood the privacy settings on their social network sites that they used. Yet it was apparent that this was not strictly the case – on digging a little deeper many of those that we spoke to experience some embarrassing incident due to overconfidence in their understanding of privacy settings.

So, for example, one posted the fact that he had an argument with his mum. He did not think his mum would see this as he had made his account private. The problem was that one of his friends in the social network ‘Liked’ the post and his mother saw it through the friend.

This was just one of the many examples we collected where teenagers thought they had understood the settings but they had not in fact considered all the different ways in which information could circulate.

And the social norms around social media sometimes make it difficult to use the tools available. So whilst it’s easy to block, unfollow and unfriend those that you don’t know well, it is often considered to be quite an aggressive act to use among those that are better known.

One person that we spoke to who had suffered cyber-bullying found the act of unfriending her assailants actually made her life more difficult in the short term.

So what should brands be doing to act responsibly in this space?

Fundamentally there is a need to understand how teenagers use social networking sites. It’s one thing offering privacy settings, but if social norms mean they are difficult to use then they often won’t be. So more nuanced settings that reflect these subtle social issues may often be helpful.

The architecture of the site will also influence the way it is used. Hence, many consider that it’s OK to ‘rant’ on some social media sites, partly because that may be the social norm but also because the posting history quickly moves from view.

So maybe it’s worth designing in a way that means teens are made more aware of their past posts, as toe curling as they might find that. And some sites seem to manage teenagers’ impulse control well, with some citing Instagram as one which seems to give the opportunity to think about and self-censor the post prior to publishing.

Behavioural economics may have a role to play here, rather than specific rules, helping to ‘nudge’ users in the direction of thoughtful behaviour.

If brands are to help teens manage their privacy effectively they need to develop a deep understanding of the social context in which their services are used and perceived. It is all too easy to inadvertently set up a scenario where teens have control in principle but in reality the weight of social norms mean they are hard to exercise.

Understanding why certain types of communication from ‘ranting’ to bullying become socially acceptable needs to be understood, and steps need to be taken to manage this effectively through what may be subtle yet important design changes. And it is not just design, there may be ways in which the site can invoke social sanctions to curb violations.

The debate about teen privacy has often veered between the despair and outrage of teenagers’ lack of privacy at one end and providers reinforcing that their privacy settings are in place at the other end.

Perhaps the discussion needs to move on to recognising the social aspects of privacy negotiation that teenagers have to face and think through how to manage this effectively. And as social media has become the new ‘public space’ for teenagers, this is not just an issue for tech companies but for all of us to get a grip on.