Students care about Facebook privacy more than the world thinks, and their use of privacy controls has skyrocketed recently, according to two researchers. Eszter Hargittai, Associate Professor of Northwestern University, and Danah Boyd, Research Associate at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society published their findings in the online peer-reviewed journal First Monday, noting that young people are very engaged with the privacy settings on Facebook, contrary to the popular belief that their age group is reckless with what they post publicly.

The researchers surveyed first-year writing students at the University of Illinois-Chicago during the 2008-2009 academic year, and then followed up with them again in 2010. The large majority—87 percent—said they used Facebook in 2009, which went up to 90 percent in 2010. Among frequent and occasional users, more than half posted their own status updates in addition to checking up (and leaving comments) on those of friends.

Among those who took the survey in both years, nine percent said they never touched Facebook's privacy settings in 2009, a figure that fell to a paltry two percent the next year. Similarly, nine percent said they had adjusted the settings just once in 2010, down from 28 percent in 2009. In contrast, the percentage of students who changed their privacy settings four or more times more than doubled from 24 to 51 percent over that period of time. The researchers noted that those who regularly contribute to activities on Facebook may be more conscious of their audience than those who use it less frequently, hence their motivation to modify their settings.

Hargittai and Boyd noted that there was little variation between men and women who were frequent Facebook users when it came to engagement with privacy controls. They say this is notable "given that in most other domains that require active online engagement (e.g., posting videos, editing Wikipedia entries), women report lower levels of involvement."

There was, however, a much higher likelihood of occasional-Facebook-using women changing their settings than occasional male users. Unsurprisingly, users who were "highly skilled" in Internet-related things were much more likely to have tweaked their privacy settings, though the researchers acknowledged that this could be either due to knowledge levels or simple unawareness of the importance of changing them.

The one thing the researchers were unsure of was why so many Facebook users started tweaking their privacy controls so much between 2009 and 2010. One theory was that there was an increase in public attention on Facebook privacy just before and during that time—indeed, Facebook's Beacon screw-up started in 2008 and got the ball rolling for a litany of complaints that have extended well into 2010. Facebook also greatly simplified its privacy controls recently, which may have led to an increase in awareness.

The important takeaway, according to Hargittai and Boyd, is that students do care about their privacy on Facebook, and a large number of them are now making regular changes to their settings. "Our results challenge widespread assumptions that youth do not care about and are not engaged with navigating privacy," they wrote. Their findings, combined with those from the Pew Internet & American Life Project from earlier this year, show that the young 'uns aren't so willing to show their drunken photos to the world as many of us thought.