Teens, kindness and cruelty on social network sites

Part 3: Privacy and safety issues

The vast majority of teens say they have private profiles visible only to “friends.”

Beyond what they post, the choices teens make about who they share information with via their social media profiles suggest that most teens are cognizant of their online privacy and have made choices to try to protect it.41 Close to two-thirds (62%) of teens who have a social media profile say the profile they use most often is set to be private so that only their friends can see the content they post.42 One in five (19%) say their profile is partially private so that friends of friends or their networks can see some version of their profile. Just 17% say their profile is set to public so that everyone can see it. This distribution is consistent regardless of how often a teen uses social network sites.

However, teens in our focus groups did describe the important differences in how various applications are structured, and how the affordances of the privacy settings on different profiles affect their willingness to use them. One middle school-aged boy described how his privacy concerns ultimately led him to delete his Twitter account:

  • MIDDLE SCHOOL BOY:  I mean, I had a Twitter. But Twitter is scary because like it’s so much more – like you can Google my name and it will have my Twitter account. And then it’s not really as protected as Facebook […] – because in Facebook, you can set a setting so it really can’t see you. But like in Twitter, I always feel like that anyone can really see any tweet that I’m doing, which may be not true… There wasn’t enough privacy, so I just deleted it. And just stick with Facebook.

Similarly, another boy in the same group said that he had deleted his Buzz account because he felt it was too public:

  • MIDDLE SCHOOL BOY:  The same thing happened with me on Buzz, because I Googled my name on Google and all my like Buzz things that I’d posted and commented on came up. So I deleted my account.           

Notes

41 The above noted research from danah boyd and Alice Marwick details how teen conceptions of “privacy” differ from their elders, and documents various messaging strategies beyond basic privacy settings that teens use to “achieve their privacy goals.” See: danah boyd and Alice Marwick. (2011). "Social Privacy in Networked Publics: Teens’ Attitudes, Practices, and Strategies." Paper presented at the Oxford Internet Institute Decade in Internet Time Symposium, September 22. [ssrn] Available at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1925128

42 This figure is consistent with what we have found in the past. In a similar question asked in 2006, 59% of teens with “active profiles” said that their profile was visible only to friends. See: http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2007/Teens-Privacy-and-Online-Social-Networks/5-Online-Privacy--What-Teens-Share-and-Restrict-in-an-Online-Environment/05-Teens-walk-the-line-between-openness-and-privacy.aspx

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The Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project is one of seven projects that make up the Pew Research Center. The Center is supported by The Pew Charitable Trust.