Young Canadians are taking steps to protect their reputations on social media, according to new research by the non-profit group, MediaSmarts. A survey of over 5,400 people looks at how they go about controlling their on line persona and how they protect personal information.
Young people want to control their online persona
A vast majority of 97 per cent of respondents said they would take steps to remove a photo they didn’t want people to see. “They really want to have a lot of control and we see them exercising those controls in pretty effective ways,” says Cathy Wing, co-executive director of MediaSmarts.
“A lot of it is social negotiation which is really interesting because these are the kinds of social norms that we want to develop in young people,” says Wing. She notes 80 per cent of respondents said they would ask whoever posted the image of them to take it down. One half said they would want friends to ask their permission before posting an image of them.
Youth use blocking tools
Nine out of ten said they use privacy setting to block certain people, primarily strangers and then to block friends. This surprised Wing who thought they would have wanted to block parents. As it turns out, most said they learned about protecting themselves from their parents.
A “huge education gap” on data mining
Two-thirds of young people mistakenly believe that if a site has a privacy policy it will not share their personal information with others. “We found there wasn’t a lot of knowledge about how these platforms make their money. So they don’t really understand how online marketing works or how geolocation services work, how data collection and data mining works,” says Wing. “There’s a huge education gap here that we really have to work on.”
Many share passwords
Almost 60 per cent said they would share the password to their social networking or email account, or their cell phone, with girls more likely to do it than boys.
A surprising 28 per cent said police should be able to read their social media posts and track their location. Wing thinks the overriding consideration there is safety.
MediaSmarts uses this information to figure out how totrain young people to have critical thinking skills when using new media.
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