Opinion: Is Online Privacy a Generational Issue?
Heather West, a policy analyst at the Center for Democracy and Technology, writes an opinion piece at Wired about privacy beliefs among different generations.
Often, I am asked why privacy advocates like CDT push government and industry to protect privacy more robustly- when “no one cares”? In short, people seem to be asserting that digital natives like myself do not value privacy online. While this point is oft repeated, I think that this argument is flawed, and does not address the subtleties of privacy in the cloud, social networks, and other new online technologies. Simply put, these technologies are giving digital natives (really, all users) greater control over their information — and we use it.
Digital immigrants tend to think about privacy as the ability to conceal information from others. Digital natives instead share information within certain contexts, and with granular privacy controls on that information. [...]
According to the Pew Internet and American Life project, both teens and adults actively manage their information online – 60% of adults and 66% of teens restrict access to information in their profile. According to the Pew study, only 6% of teens make their first and last name publicly accessible on social networks- a very telling statistic. We want our cake, and we want to eat it too — we want to share our content online, and we want to control who we share it with.
Rather than an all-or-nothing public or private paradigm, we expect to be able to choose levels of privacy and levels of exposure to the public.
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