While many people over 50 don’t even know what Facebook really is, the younger generation has been reared on it since childhood, and many find posting personal details on social media about as normal as waking up in the morning.
However, a new report, carried out by Colin Strong of the MRS Delphi Society, suggests that teens are getting sick and tired of sharing stuff on their Facebook accounts and are now taking steps to safeguard their privacy more and more.
The report also spoke of a new phenomenon called “vague-booking,” whereby teens deliberately post vague statements in order to prompt friends to private message them.
The same report also noted that the rise of apps like Snapchat , which erases pictures after a short amount of time, proves that teens want their privacy protected, no matter what.
Strong’s report says, “There is an almost universally held view that teenagers simply don’t care enough about online privacy.”
However, this isn’t so true, as proved by the report.
Jane Frost, chief executive of the MRS, told reporters that she believes that many Twitter users have a private account, only shared with close friends, as well as a public one.
As Strong said, “Just because it’s in a public space doesn’t mean they want publicity.”
Those views are not shared by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who said at the Crunchie Awards in 2010, “People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.”‘
At the time, Zuckerberg added, “When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was, ‘why would I want to put any information on the internet at all? Why would I want to have a website? Then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way, and just all these different services that have people sharing all this information.”
