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Teens Actually Care About Online Privacy 93

CowboyRobot writes "According to a new report by Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, more than half of American teenagers have steered clear of a mobile app due to worries about privacy. Some 56 percent of younger teens (ages 12 to 14) who use mobile apps avoid some apps after learning they had to share personal information to use it, while 49 percent of older teens (14 to 17) have. Also, teens who had at some point sought outside advice about privacy management were considerably more likely than those who had not sought advice to say that they had disabled location tracking features."
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Teens Actually Care About Online Privacy

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  • Good to hear! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24, 2013 @04:27PM (#44665599)

    I'm happy with half. Most people are idiots. Nearly half of any group not being a total idiot has to count as a win.
    Never really could reconcile this generation's seemingly blase attitude towards anonymity with my own generation's take on the internet. I was a teen when the internet became A Thing, and all us kids were completely fucking enamored with the anonymity. A place where we weren't judged by our age, merely by our worth? FUCKIN' A! Perfect!

  • But... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Pollux ( 102520 ) <[speter] [at] [tedata.net.eg]> on Saturday August 24, 2013 @04:28PM (#44665607) Journal

    Did they weigh that variable at all against what percentage of their peers used the app? To what extent do kids care about privacy in the face of peer pressure?

    Facebook demands substantial personal information about you, but last I checked, it's still the most popular social networking app kids use.

  • Just steered clear (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24, 2013 @04:42PM (#44665673)

    of the reddit "enhancement" suite upgrade because it suddenly wanted access to history and tabs.

    Been using it for a while until then, but now I dropped it. So it happens.

  • The Next Generation (Score:3, Interesting)

    by wrackspurt ( 3028771 ) on Saturday August 24, 2013 @04:45PM (#44665699)
    In human terms a generation is around plus twenty years. The internet about twenty years ago didn't have Google or Facebook. On /. the big concern was how completely insecure windows 95 was. There was a bit of chatter about privacy but it wasn't front and centre. The next generation has grown up on the internet and with social networking. It may be privacy will become the next way to show how cool you are. Who knows, crazy kids.... we can only hope.
  • Yeah, sure... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24, 2013 @04:53PM (#44665745)

    They care about it because Google's app store shows them what permissions the app requires, then they jump to shortsighted conclusions. I once had someone email me some insulting words because my application kept track of the phone state in an attempt to reconnect gracefully after a call on CDMA carries. I guarantee the ~50% of teenagers who have not used an app because of privacy concerns have a Facebook account.

  • Re:Logical enough... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Seumas ( 6865 ) on Saturday August 24, 2013 @05:01PM (#44665797)

    Exactly this. The media puts out this idea that because kids use more technology than kids of any other generation, it somehow equates to them being more technologically capable. I'm sorry, but kids using an iPad to play a game or their PC for twitter and WoW are not the same thing as kids knowing how a computer works, how to setup a router, debugging networking issues, writing code, and so on.

    Further, I do not believe that most kids give a fuck about privacy, because their actions don't follow that claim. Further, these are the same age groups that were polled a few years ago and said they felt that the press had too much free speech and the government should do something about it.

    That said, it has become trendy (thanks to reddit) for young people to suddenly give a fuck about things like their privacy. So . . . I guess there's that.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24, 2013 @05:58PM (#44666035)

    Every kid these days has a social media portfolio (doesn't matter if its Facebook,twitter,instagram it adult friend finder). Slashdot community and kids have very different views of privacy, slashdot is more concerned with protecting data from corporations and governments (lurks,pgp,etc.) while kids are more concerned with protecting data from individuals (snapchat,password protected phones,etc.). Keep that in mind when taking in this article. I'm barely an adult myself and a year ago when I was in high school nobody but a small handful (5 or so in a school of 1000) actually understood the implications of data being stored by other parties and actively fought against them. While its not a popular view its refreshing to know that I expanded the understanding of controlling your own personal data to the staff and other students.

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