Risky Behaviors and Online Safety: A 2010 Literature Review

I’m pleased to announce a rough draft of Risky Behaviors and Online Safety: A 2010 Literature Review for public feedback. This Literature Review was produced for Harvard Berkman Center’s Youth and Media Policy Working Group Initiative, co-directed by John Palfrey, Urs Gasser, and myself and funded by the MacArthur Foundation. This Literature Review builds on the 2008 LitReview that Andrew Schrock and I crafted for the Internet Safety Technical Task Force. This document is not finalized, but we want to make our draft available broadly so that scholars working in this area can inform us of anything that we might be missing.

Risky Behaviors and Online Safety: A 2010 Literature Review

It’s been almost two years since the Internet Safety Technical Task Force completed its work. As a co-director of that project, I coordinated the Research Advisory Board to make certain that we included all of the different research that addressed online safety. When we shared our report, we were heavily criticized as being naive and clueless (or worse). Much of the criticism was directed at me and the researchers. We were regularly told that social network sites would radically change the picture of online safety and that we simply didn’t have new enough data to understand how different things would be in a few years. Those critiques continue. As researchers who were actively collecting data and in the field, many of us are frustrated because what we see doesn’t match what the politicians believe. It’s been two years since we put out that first Lit Review and I’m glad to be able to share an updated one with all sorts of new data. Not surprisingly (to us at least), not much has changed.

What you’ll find is that researchers have gone deeper, getting a better picture of some of the dynamics and implications. You’ll also find that the overarching picture has not changed much. Many of the core messages that we shared in the ISTTF report continue to hold. In this updated Lit Review, we interrogate the core issues raised in the ISTTF report and introduce new literature that complements, conflicts, or clarifies what was previously said. We bring in international data to provide a powerful comparison, most notably from the reports that came out in the EU and Australia. And we highlight areas where new research is currently underway and where more research is necessary.

This Literature Review does not include information on sexting, which can be found in Sexting: Youth Practices and Legal Implications. It also does not include some of the material on self-harm because we are working on a separate review of that material (to be released soon).

As I said, this is a draft version that we’re putting out for public commentary and critique. We will continue to modify this in the upcoming months. If you think we’re missing anything, please let us know!!

Sexting: Youth Practices and Legal Implications

Dena Sacco and her team have put together a fantastic document that maps out the legal and socio-legal issues surrounding sexting: Sexting: Youth Practices and Legal Implications. This is for the Berkman Center Youth and Media Policy Working Group that I’m coordinating with John Palfrey and Urs Gasser (funded by the MacArthur Foundation).

Sexting: Youth Practices and Legal Implications

This document addresses legal and practical issues related to the practice colloquially known as sexting. It was created by Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, based at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, for the Berkman Center’s Youth and Media Policy Working Group Initiative. The Initiative is exploring policy issues that fall within three substantive clusters emerging from youth’s information and communications technology practices: Risky Behaviors and Online Safety; Privacy, Publicity and Reputation; and Youth Created Content and Information Quality. The Initiative is funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and is co-directed by danah boyd, Urs Gasser, and John Palfrey. This document was created for the Risky Behaviors and Online Safety cluster, which is focused on four core issues: (1) sexual solicitation and problematic sexual encounters; (2) Internet-related bullying and harassment; (3) access to problematic content, including pornography and self-harm content; and (4) youth-generated problematic content, including sexting. The Initiative’s goal is to bring the best research on youth and media into the policy-making debate and to propose practical interventions based upon that research.

This document is intended to provide background for discussion of interventions related to sexting. It begins with a definition of sexting, and continues with overviews of research and media stories related to sexting. It then discusses the statutory and constitutional framework for child pornography and obscenity. It concludes with a description of current and pending legislation meant to address sexting.

Upcoming fieldwork: What do you want to know?

I’m gearing up for a bunch of new on-the-ground fieldwork and intend to do a host of semi-structured interviews with American teenagers in different parts of the U.S. in the upcoming months. While I talk to teens regularly, new in-depth fieldwork allows me to really tease out core conceptual puzzles. My goal for this upcoming bout of fieldwork is to really go deep into questions surrounding privacy and publicity. But as I start fieldtesting new questions and running pilot interviews, I thought I’d throw it out to you too. So….

What do you want to know about teens and social media?

Also… if you have general questions for me about my findings, I’m trying out Formspring to field questions. Feel free to ask me questions about research at any time and I’ll do my best to answer them!

Four Essays Addressing Risky Behaviors and Online Safety

At Harvard’s Berkman Center, John Palfrey, Urs Gasser, and I have been co-directing the Youth and Media Policy Working Group Initiative to investigate the role that policy can play in addressing core issues involving youth and media. John has been leading up the Privacy, Publicity, and Reputation track; Urs has been managing Youth Created Content and Information Quality track; and I have been coordinating the Risky Behaviors and Online Safety track. We’ll have a lot of different pieces coming out over the next few months that stem from this work. Today, I’m pleased to share four important essays that emerged from the work we’ve been doing in the Risky Behaviors and Online Safety track:

“Moving Beyond One Size Fits All With Digital Citizenship” by Matt Levinson and Deb Socia

This essay addresses some of the challenges that educators face when trying to address online safety and digital citizenship in the classroom.

“Evaluating Online Safety Programs” by Tobit Emmens and Andy Phippen

This essay talks about the importance of evaluating interventions that are implemented so as to not face dangerous unintended consequences, using work in suicide prevention as a backdrop.

“The Future of Internet Safety Education: Critical Lessons from Four Decades of Youth Drug Abuse Prevention” by Lisa M. Jones

This essay contextualizes contemporary internet safety programs in light of work done in the drug abuse prevention domain to highlight best practices to implementing interventions.

“Online Safety: Why Research is Important” by David Finkelhor, Janis Wolak, and Kimberly J. Mitchell

This essay examines the role that research can and should play in shaping policy.

These four essays provide crucial background information for understanding the challenges of implementing education and public health interventions in the area of online safety. I hope you will read them because they are truly mind-expanding pieces.

“for the lolz”: 4chan is hacking the attention economy

(Newbie note: If you have never heard of 4chan, start with the Wikipedia entry and not the website itself. The site tends to offend many adults’ sensibilities. As one of my friends put it, loving LOLcats or rickrolling as outputs is like loving a tasty hamburger; visiting 4chan is like visiting the meat factory. At some point, it’d probably help to visit the meat factory, but that might make you go vegetarian.)

Over the last year, 4chan emerged from complete obscurity to being recognized by mainstream media as something of significance. Perhaps it was moot’s appearance at the top of the TIME 100 list. More likely, it was moot’s TED talk on anonymity that tipped it all over. At TED, moot – otherwise known as Chris Poole – revealed a more “legitimate” side of an underground site typically known to outsiders as the cesspool of the internet. And in doing so, he marked himself as one of the more articulate, thoughtful, and entertaining community leaders on the web. In short, he was someone that adults could embrace, even if his site scared the shit out of them.

Amidst all of this, 4chan has “popped.” Journalists and academics are clamoring to discuss and analyze 4chan. At first, it was all about discussing whether or not this community of 9.5 million mostly young mostly male internet people was evil or brilliant. Lately, the obsession focuses on anonymity, signaling that Chris’ TED talk set the frame for public discourse about 4chan. Both of these are certainly interesting topics. 4chan has created some of the most lovable memes on the internet but /b/tards have also been some of the most nefarious trolls and griefers on the web. And anonymity is a really complex topic that can’t be boiled down to a question of accountability in light of whether or not the anonymous commentator is seen as evil or brilliant. And while I could write a long essay on how the anonymity that people seek on the web counters the ways in which identifiability on the web far exceeds any identifiability that ever existed offline, that’s not the point of this post. Instead, what I want to claim is that 4chan is next-gen hacker culture. And that it should be appreciated (and vilified) on those terms.

I grew up in a community of hackers at the tale end of the security hacking days. Many of my friends in high school prided themselves on their phreaking skills or in their ability to break into high-end security systems. While some were truly gifted technical geniuses, few were true crackers bent on destroying systems with malicious intentions. Most of my friends simply wanted to see what they could do. And mostly, the hacking that was taking place was really mundane, leveraging people’s stupidity in using “admin/admin” as their username/password combo to leave little love notes and easter eggs. Of course, there were consequences. One of my friends was forbidden from using the internet throughout high school while another ended up doing time in the Navy’s security system in lieu of the alternatives. I was not connected to the 31337 hackers that were central to the security hacking era, but I grew up on the margins in ways that allowed me to appreciate their technical prowess (and to want to be Angelina Jolie a few years later).

Depending on where you sit, security hackers are vilified or adored, recognized for the havoc that they wreaked and for really challenging systems to be much more secure. As a community, they were the underground of the 80s and 90s. Yet, today, former hackers are some of the most powerful people in the tech industry. Some hackers had truly malicious intentions while others were engaged in a series of acts that can best be understood through a popular 4chan phrase: “for the lolz.” It was entertaining to see what one could do. And while most of those who were in it for the lolz had no political agenda, the resultant acts of the security hackers ended up being deeply political, ended up really shaping the development of technological systems.

I would argue that 4chan is ground zero of a new generation of hackers – those who are bent on hacking the attention economy. While the security hackers were attacking the security economy at the center of power and authority in the pre-web days, these attention hackers are highlighting how manipulatable information flows are. They are showing that Top 100 lists can be gamed and that entertaining content can reach mass popularity without having any commercial intentions (regardless of whether or not someone decided to commercialize it on the other side). Their antics force people to think about status and power and they encourage folks to laugh at anything that takes itself too seriously. The mindset is deeply familiar to me and it doesn’t surprise me when I learn that old hacker types get a warm fuzzy feeling thinking about 4chan even if trolls and griefers annoy the hell out of them. In a mediated environment where marketers are taking over, there’s something subversively entertaining about betting on the anarchist subculture. Cuz, really, at the end of the day, many old skool hackers weren’t entirely thrilled to realize that mainstreamification of net culture meant that mainstream culture would dominate net culture. For us geeks, freaks, and queers who embraced the internet as a savior, mainstreamification has meant a new form of disempowerment.

As with security hackers, the attention hackers that are popping up today are a mixed bag. It’s easy to love the cultural ethos and despise some of the individuals or the individual acts. In recognizing the cultural power of the community represented by 4chan, I don’t mean to justify some of the truly hateful things that some individuals have done. But I am willing to laugh off some of the stupidity and find humor in the antics while also rejecting certain acts. I’m willing to lament the fact that it’s been 20 years and underground hacking culture is still mostly white and mostly male while also being stoked to see a new underground subculture emerge. Of course, it doesn’t look like it’ll be underground for long… And I can’t say that I’m too thrilled for every mom and pop and average teen to know about 4chan (which is precisely why I haven’t blogged about it before). But I do think that there’s something important about those invested in hacking the attention economy. And I do hope that we always have people around us reminding us to never take the internets too seriously.

Update: Yes, I know the more commonly accepted spelling of lolz is lulz. (The full phrase should also be: “I did it for the lulz.”) I can’t explain why I prefer lolz but I always have and there are others out there who use this variant as well. Lulz highlights the negativity (since it’s loling at someone else’s expense) while lolz focus on generalized laughter, not always hurtful laughter. I prefer to think of things in this frame. YMMV.

(Translated into Russian by Mikhail Karpov)

Mikhail Karpov

How COPPA Fails Parents, Educators, Youth

Ever wonder why youth have to be over 13 to create an account on Facebook or Gmail or Skype? It has nothing to do with safety.

In 1998, the U.S. Congress enacted the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) with the best of intentions. They wanted to make certain that corporations could not collect or sell data about children under the age of 13 without parental permission, so they created a requirement to check age and get parental permission for those under 13. Most companies took one look at COPPA and decided that the process of getting parental consent was far too onerous so they simply required all participants to be at least 13 years of age. The notifications that say “You must be 13 years or older to use this service” and the pull-down menus that don’t allow you to indicate that you’re under 13 have nothing to do with whether or not a website is appropriate for a child; it has to do with whether or not the company thinks that it’s worth the effort to seek parental permission.

COPPA is currently being discussed by the Federal Trade Commission and the US Senate. Most of the conversation focuses on whether or not companies are abiding by the ruling and whether or not the age should be upped to 18. What is not being discussed is the effectiveness of this legislation or what it means to American families (let alone families in other countries who are affected by it). In trying to understand COPPA’s impact, my research led me conclude four things:

Parents and youth believe that age requirements are designed to protect their safety, rather than their privacy.
Parents want their children to have access to social media service to communicate with extended family members.
Parents teach children to lie about their age to circumvent age limitations.
Parents believe that age restrictions take away their parental choice.

How the Public Interprets COPPA-Prompted Age Restrictions

Most parents and youth believe that the age requirements that they encounter when signing up to various websites are equivalent to a safety warning. They interpret this limitation as: “This site is not suitable for children under the age of 13.” While this might be true, that’s not actually what the age restriction is about. Not only does COPPA fail to inform parents about the appropriateness of a particular site, but parental misinterpretations of the age restrictions mean that few are aware that this stems from an attempt to protect privacy.

While many parents do not believe that social network sites like Facebook and MySpace are suitable for young children, they often want their children to have access to other services that have age restrictions (email, instant messaging, video services, etc.). Often, parents cite that these tools enable children to connect with extended family; Skype is especially important to immigrant parents who have extended family outside of the US. Grandparents were most frequently cited as the reason why parents created accounts for their young children. Many parents will create accounts for children even before they are literate because the value of connecting children to family outweighs the age restriction. When parents encourage their children to use these services, they send a conflicting message that their kids eventually learn: ignore some age limitations but not others.

By middle school, communication tools and social network sites are quite popular among tweens who pressure their parents for permission to get access to accounts on these services because they want to communicate with their classmates, church friends, and friends who have moved away. Although parents in the wealthiest and most educated segments of society often forbid their children from signing up to social network sites until they turn 13, most parents support their children’s desires to acquire email and IM, precisely because of familial use. To join, tweens consistently lie about their age when asked to provide it. When I interviewed teens about who taught them to lie, the overwhelming answer was parents. I interviewed parents who consistently admitted to helping their children circumvent the age restriction by teaching them that they needed to choose a birth year that would make them over 13. Even in households where an older sibling or friend was the educator, parents knew their children had email and IM and social network sites accounts. Interestingly, in households where parents forbid Facebook but allow email, kids have started noting the hypocritical stance of their parents. That’s not a good outcome of this misinterpretation.

When I asked parents about how they felt about the age restrictions presented by social websites, parents had one of two responses. When referencing social network sites, parents stated that they felt that the restrictions were justified because younger children were too immature to handle the challenges of social network sites. Yet, when discussing sites and services that they did not believe were risky environments or that they felt were important for family communication, parents often felt as though the limitations were unnecessarily restrictive. Those who interpreted the restriction as a maturity rating did not understand why the sites required age confirmation. Some other parents felt as though the websites were trying to tell them how to parent. Some were particularly outraged by what they felt was a paternal attitude by websites, making statements like: “Who are they to tell me how to be a good parent?”

Across the board, parents and youth misinterpret the age requirements that emerged from the implementation of COPPA. Except for the most educated and technologically savvy, they are completely unaware that these restrictions have anything to do with privacy. More problematically, parents’ conflicting ways in which they address some age restrictions and not others sends a dangerous message.

Policy Literacy and the Future of COPPA

There’s another issue here that’s not regularly addressed. COPPA affects educators and social services in counterintuitive ways. While non-commercial services are not required to abide by COPPA, there are plenty of commercial education and health services out there who are seeking to help youth. Parental permission might be viable for an organization working to help kids learn arithmetic through online tutoring, but it is completely untenable when we’re thinking about suicide hotlines, LGBT programs, and mental health programs. (Keep in mind that many hospitals are for-profit even if their free websites are out there for general help.)

COPPA is well-intended but its implementation and cultural uptake have been a failure. The key to making COPPA work is not to making it stricter or to force the technology companies to be better at confirming that the kids on their site are not underage. Not only is this technologically infeasible without violating privacy at an even greater level, doing so would fail to recognize what’s actually happening on the ground. Parents want to be able to parent, to be able to decide what services are appropriate for their children. At the same time, we shouldn’t forget that not all parents are present and we don’t want to shut teens out of crucial media spaces because their parents are absent, as would often be the case if we upped the age to 18. The key to improving COPPA is to go back to the table and think about how children’s data is being used, whether it’s collected implicitly or explicitly.

In order for the underlying intentions of COPPA to work, we need both information literacy and policy literacy. We need to find ways to help digital citizens understand how their information is being used, what rights they have, and how the policies that exist affect their lives. If parents and educators don’t understand that the 13 limitation is about privacy, COPPA will continue to fail. It’s time that parents and educators learned more about COPPA and start sharing their own perspective, asking Congress to do a better job of addressing the privacy issues without taking away their rights to parent and educate. And without marginalizing those who aren’t fortunate enough to have engaged parents by their side.

John Palfrey, Urs Gasser, and I submitted a statement to the FTC and Senate called “How COPPA, as Implemented, is Misinterpreted by the Public: A Research Perspective. To learn more about COPPA or submit your own letter to the FTC and Senate, go to the FTC website.

This post was originally posted at the DML Central blog.

Image Credit: WarzauWynn

i can haz housesitting tool pls?

Dear enterprising developers of the world, I have a request:

I travel a lot. I prefer staying in apartments to staying in hotels. But I hate imposing on friends and, frankly, crashing on couches isn’t as fun as it used to be. When I’m lucky, I randomly learn that a friend is out of town and I have the opportunity to housesit. And when I’m lucky, I randomly learn that someone I trust is in Boston when I’m not and can get them to catsit/housesit. Cuz I’m always begging for housesitters. But there has to be a better way of getting this information in our world of interconnectedness.

I want an application that lets me announce to my friends when I’m out of town and my apartment is vacant or when I need a housesitter. And I want to know when people that I know are out of town and would welcome me to housesit/catsit/plantsit. As wonderful as couchsurfing.com and airbdb are, they don’t serve my needs. I don’t want the burden of having to socialize with strangers (or, realistically, friends) when I travel for work nor do I typically want to stay at strangers’ places (or have strangers stay at my place). I want an easy way to trade apartments with people that I already know. And I want to know when people’s homes are vacant, not when I’m welcome to crash at their place.

I want to be able to create a calendar of when my place is empty and see when my friends’ places are empty. I want to be able to indicate who I trust to see my empty apartment calendar. I want to be able to pivot based on location and see when there’s a specific need (like catsitting). It’d be great to message out to friends when I have a catsitting need. I don’t want to make my calendar available to just anyone that I know so opening it up to anyone in my Facebook social graph isn’t the solution. I want it to be really easy for my friends to indicate when they’re gone so that it’s not a crazy burden to keep the calendar updated. .

Perhaps there’s a tool out there that would meet my needs that I don’t know about and, if so, please tell me. But so far, I haven’t been able to find one. And I don’t think that it would be that hard to build; a minimalist tool would be good enough. I’m not sure that such an application is actually monetizable because no money is being exchanged, but perhaps travel ads could make it profitable.

Anyhow, I throw this desire to the coding wolves in the hopes that someone might make it a reality. I would be eternally grateful.

ktxby

Deception + fear + humiliation != education

I hate fear-based approaches to education. I grew up on the “this is your brain on drugs” messages and watched classmates go from being afraid of drugs to trying marijuana to deciding that all of the messages about drugs were idiotic. (Crystal meth and marijuana shouldn’t be in the same category.) Much to my frustration, adults keep turning to fear to “educate” the kids with complete disregard to the unintended consequences of this approach. Sometimes, it’s even worse. I recently received an email from a friend of mine (Chloe Cockburn) discussing an issue brought before the ACLU. She gave me permission to share this with you:

A campus police officer has been offering programs about the dangers inherent in using the internet to middle and high school assemblies. As part of her presentation she displays pictures that students have posted on their Facebook pages. The idea is to demonstrate that anyone can have access to this information, so be careful. She gains access to the students’ Facebook pages by creating false profiles claiming to be a student at the school and asking to be “friended”, evidently in violation of Facebook policy.

An ACLU affiliate received a complaint from a student at a small rural high school. The entire assembly was shown a photo of her holding a beer. The picture was not on the complainant’s Facebook page, but on one belonging to a friend of hers, who allowed access to the bogus profile created by the police officer. The complainant was not “punished” as the plaintiff above was, but she was humiliated, and she is afraid that she will not get some local scholarship aid as a result.

So here we have a police officer intentionally violating Facebook’s policy and creating a deceptive profile to entrap teenagers and humiliate them to “teach them a lesson”??? Unethical acts + deception + fear + humiliation != education. This. Makes. Me. Want. To. Scream.

“Transparency is Not Enough”

At Gov2.0 this week, I gave a talk on the importance of information literacy when addressing transparency of government data:

“Transparency is Not Enough”

I address everything from registered sex offenders to what happens when politicians don’t like data to the complexities of interpretation. In doing so, I make three key points:

Information is power, but interpretation is more powerful
Data taken out of context can have unintended consequences
Transparency alone is not the great equalizer

My talk is also available on YouTube if you prefer to listen to a different version of the same message (since my crib is what I intended to say and the video is what actually came out of my mouth).

Pew Research confirms that youth care about their reputation

In today’s discussions about privacy, “youth don’t care about privacy” is an irritating but popular myth. Embedded in this rhetoric is the belief that youth are reckless risk-takers who don’t care about the consequences of their actions. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

In my own work, I’ve found that teenagers care deeply about privacy in that they care about knowing how information flows and wanting influence over it. They care deeply about their reputation and leverage the tools available to help shape who they are. Of course, reputation and privacy always come back to audience. And audience is where we continuously misunderstand teenagers. They want to make sure that people they respect or admire think highly of them. But this doesn’t always mean that they care about how YOU think about them. So a teenager may be willing to sully their reputation as their parents see it if it gives them street cred that makes them cool amongst their peers. This is why reputation is so messy. There’s no universal reputation, no universal self-presentation. It’s always about audience.

The teenagers that I first started interviewing in 2004 are now young adults. Many are in college or in the army and their views on their reputation have matured. How they think about privacy and information flow has also matured. They’re thinking about a broader world. At the same time, they’re doing so having developed an understanding of these challenges through their engagement with social media. Are their ideas about these technologies perfect? Of course not. But they’re a whole lot more nuanced than those of most adults that I talk with.

Earlier today, Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project released a report entitled “Reputation, Management, and Social Media” which includes a slew of data that might seem counter-intuitive to adults who have really skewed mythical views of youth and young adults. They found that young adults are more actively engaged in managing what they share online than older adults. In fact, 71% of the 18-29s interviewed in August-September of 2009 who use social network sites reported having changed their privacy settings (vs. 55% of those 50-64). Think about that. This was before Time Magazine put privacy on their front page.

Now, let’s be clear… Young adults are actively engaged in managing their reputation but they’re not always successful. The tools are confusing and companies continue to expose them without them understanding what’s happening. But the fact that they go out of their way to try to shape their information is important. It signals very clearly that young adults care deeply about information flow and reputation.

Reputation matters. This is why Pew found that 47% of 18-29s delete comments made by others on their profiles (vs. 29% of 30-49s and 26% of 50-64s). Likewise, 41% of them remove their name from photos (vs. 24% of 30-49s and 18% of 50-64s). While Pew didn’t collect data on those under 18, I’d expect that this age-wise trend would continue into that age bracket. Much of this is because of digital literacy – the younger folks understand the controls better than the older folks AND they understand the implications better. We spend a lot more time telling teenagers and young adults that there are consequences to reputation when information is put up online than we do listening to ourselves. This is also because, as always, youth are learning the hard way. As Pew notes, young adults have made mistakes that they regret. They’ve also seen their friends make mistakes that they regret. All of this leads to greater consciousness about these issues and a deeper level of engagement.

As always, this Pew report is filled to the brim with useful information that gives us a sense of what’s going on. Here are some of my favorite bullet points:

Young adults are still more likely than older users to say they limit the amount of information available about them online.
Those who know more, worry more. And those who express concern are twice as likely to say they take steps to limit the amount of information available about them online.
The most visible and engaged internet users are also most active in limiting the information connected to their names online.
The more you see footprints left by others, the more likely you are to limit your own.
Those who take steps to limit the information about them online are less likely to post comments online using their real name.
More than half of social networking users (56%) have “unfriended” others in their network.
Just because we’re friends doesn’t mean I’m listening: 41% of social networking users say they filter updates posted by some of their friends.
Young adult users of social networking sites report the lowest levels of trust in them.

This Pew report does more than inform us about privacy and reputation issues. Its data sends an important message: We need more literacy about these issues. Ironically, I think that the best thing that’s going to come about because of Facebook’s ongoing screw-ups is an increased awareness of privacy issues. When youth see that they can do one of two things with their interests: delete them or make them publicly visible to everyone, they’re going to think twice. Sure, many will still make a lot of that content publicly accessible. And others will be very angry at Facebook for not giving them a meaningful choice. But this is going to force people to think about these issues. And the more people think about it, the more they actively try to control what’s going on. (Of course, we need Facebook to stop taking controls away from people, but that’s a different story.)

Pew’s report also counters a lot of myths that I’ve been hearing. For example, the desire for anonymity isn’t dead. Facebook tends to proudly announce that its users are completely honest about their names. Guess what? Many youth don’t trust Facebook. And they’re not providing them with real names either. Just take a look at this screen shot that I grabbed from a publicly accessible Facebook profile. This image isn’t doctored and while some of the names reflect real ones, there’s a lot of obscuring going on.

If you care about youth, if you care about issues of privacy and reputation, PLEASE read the Pew report. It is an example of brilliant research and tremendous reporting.

danah boyd | apophenia

making connections where none previously existed