The Truth about Teens and Privacy

Think they don’t care about privacy?

Think again.

By danah boyd

Many teens feel as though they’re in a no-win situation when it comes to sharing information online: damned if they publish their personal thoughts to public spaces, and damned if they create private space that parents can’t see. Parent-teen battles about privacy have gone on for decades. Parents complain when teens demand privacy by asking their parents to stay out of their bedroom, to refrain from listening in on their phone conversations, and to let them socialize with their friends without being chaperoned. In the same breath, these same parents express frustration when teens wear ill-fitting clothes or skimpy outfits. They have long seen revealing clothing as an indicator of teens’ rejection of privacy. In other words, common and long-standing teen practices have historically been sure signs of teens’ unhealthy obsession with, or rejection of, privacy.

Social media has introduced a new dimension to the well-worn fights over private space and personal expression. Teens do not want their parents to view their online profiles or look over their shoulder when they’re chatting with friends. Parents are no longer simply worried about what their children wear out of the house but what they photograph themselves wearing in their bedroom to post online. Interactions that were previously invisible to adults suddenly have traces, prompting parents to fret over conversations that adults deem inappropriate or when teens share “TMI” (too much information).

While my childhood included “Keep Out” bedroom signs and battles over leather miniskirts and visible bras, the rise of the internet has turned fights over privacy and exposure into headline news for an entire cohort of youth.

Teens often grow frustrated with adult assumptions that suggest that they are part of a generation that has eschewed privacy in order to participate in social media. In North Carolina, I asked “Waffles” about this issue, and he responded with exasperation. “Every teenager wants privacy. Every single last one of them, whether they tell you or not, wants privacy.” Waffles is a geeky white seventeen-year-old teen who spends hours each day interacting with people through video games and engaging deeply in a wide variety of online communities. He balked at the idea that his participation in these networked publics signals that he doesn’t care about privacy. “Just because teenagers use internet sites to connect to other people doesn’t mean they don’t care about their privacy. We don’t tell everybody every single thing about our lives. . . . So to go ahead and say that teenagers don’t like privacy is pretty ignorant and inconsiderate honestly, I believe, on the adults’ part.” Waffles articulated a sentiment that I usually saw expressed through an eye roll: teenagers, acutely aware of how many adults dismiss their engagement in social media, have little patience for adults’ simplistic assumptions about teen privacy.

Although teens grapple with managing their identity and navigating youth-centric communities while simultaneously maintaining spaces for intimacy, they do so under the spotlight of a media ecosystem designed to publicize every teen fad, moral panic, and new hyped technology. Each week, news stories lament the death of privacy, consistently referring to teen engagement with public social media services as proof of privacy’s demise. In her New York Magazine article describing people’s willingness to express themselves publicly, Emily Nussbaum articulated a concern about youth that is widespread: “Kids today. They have no sense of shame. They have no sense of privacy. They are show-offs, fame whores, pornographic little loons who post their diaries, their phone numbers, their stupid poetry — for God’s sake, their dirty photos! — online.” Throughout the United States, I heard this sentiment expressed in less eloquent terms by parents, teachers, and religious officials who were horrified by what teens were willing to share. They often approached me, genuinely worried about their children’s future and unable to understand why anyone who cared about themselves and their privacy would be willing to be actively engaged online.

The idea that teens share too much — and therefore don’t care about privacy — is now so entrenched in public discourse that research showing that teens do desire privacy and work to get it is often ignored by the media.

Regardless of how many young people engage in privacy practices, adults reference teens’ public expressions as decisive evidence of contemporary teen immodesty and indecency. Meanwhile, technology executives like Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg and Google chairman Eric Schmidt reinforce the notion that today’s teens are different, arguing that social norms around privacy have changed in order to justify their own business decisions regarding user privacy. They cite youth’s widespread engagement with social media as evidence that the era of privacy is over. Journalists, parents, and technologists seem to believe that a willingness to share in public spaces — and, most certainly, any act of exhibitionism and publicity — is incompatible with a desire for personal privacy.

The teens that I met genuinely care about their privacy, but how they understand and enact it may not immediately resonate or appear logical to adults. When teens — and, for that matter, most adults — seek privacy, they do so in relation to those who hold power over them. Unlike privacy advocates and more politically conscious adults, teens aren’t typically concerned with governments and corporations. Instead, they’re trying to avoid surveillance from parents, teachers, and other immediate authority figures in their lives. They want the right to be ignored by the people who they see as being “in their business.”

Teens are not particularly concerned about organizational actors; rather, they wish to avoid paternalistic adults who use safety and protection as an excuse to monitor their everyday sociality.

Teens’ desire for privacy does not undermine their eagerness to participate in public. There’s a big difference between being in public and being public. Teens want to gather in public environments to socialize, but they don’t necessarily want every vocalized expression to be publicized. Yet, because being in a networked public — unlike gathering with friends in a public park — often makes interactions more visible to adults, mere participation in social media can blur these two dynamics. At first blush, the desire to be in public and have privacy seems like a contradiction. But understanding how teens conceptualize privacy and navigate social media is key to understanding what privacy means in a networked world, a world in which negotiating fuzzy boundaries is par for the course. Instead of signaling the end of privacy as we know it, teens’ engagement with social media highlights the complex interplay between privacy and publicity in the networked world we all live in now.

Excerpted from It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. Copyright © 2014 by danah boyd. Yale University Press. All Rights Reserved.

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