ShirJorg's Technojournies: Stranger Danger? ….It’s Those Friends You Have To Worry About

Back in the day, and I mean pre-Facebook days, I used to tell my students,” Show me your friends and I’ll show you your future.”

Little did any of us know that this statement of the power of peer influence would reach into a student’s digital future, dragging along his past and his present. What our current young digital users are gaining in “friends” they are losing in privacy.

I would argue that privacy is a relatively modern concept. Even as recently as mid 20th century, in rural Alberta, for example, privacy was a negotiated norm bartered for access to community. The currency of privacy became inflated with urbanization and technology of the late 20th century-on one level privacy has always been a commodity of the privileged.

In January, Facebook founder, Mark Zucherberg, in a thinly disguised attempt to justify the increasing exposure of user data to marketing interests declared that privacy is “no longer a social norm.”

dana boyd, disagrees.

“There isn’t some radical shift in norms taking place. What’s changing is the opportunity to be public and the potential gain from doing so. As more private lives are exported online, reasonable expectations are diminishing..and by necessity our legal protection diminishes.”

An new study from the University of Ottawa (2009), Lessons from the Identity Trail: Anonymity, Privacy and Identity in a Networked Society, illustrates while individual privacy needs to be balanced against the desires of business and government to collect and analyze information for their own benefit, there is a lack of legal protection for anonymity in many countries, including Canada.

With relentless evolving technology the consequences of eroding privacy will continue to compromise younger digital natives’ online identities.

I see three problems framing this issue:
Awareness
While Palfrey & Gasser (2008) see digital natives as being indifferent toward their public and private identities, the researchers do differentiate between young users who are aware of their digital footprints and those who aren’t. And while those who are aware may have limited ability to retrace their steps, those who lack the capacity to do so aren’t even aware of the issues. This becomes another Digital Divide. But the reality is that it is impossible for any user to find and extinguish all their personal data.“Digital Natives will be the first to experience the compounding effect of the creation of identities and digital dossiers over a long period of time " (p 62). This disturbing trend has its foundation in a misplaced trust from digital natives who are not discerning that businesses and governments as well as friends have access to their data.

Are there trends of disintegrating privacy beyond social networking sites? I see
Google Goggles’, facial recognition as one example where an application has outstripped public policy on privacy.

Context
Selwyn’s (2007) research reveals that students assume “public” refers to those friends who are allowed privacy access. But due to their age and limited experience, they have no clue as to the repercussions down the road of having lived their adolescent lives in front of the lens of reality TV and always on social media.

dana boyd as a panel member of the Pew Research Conference on Millennials, Media and Information (2010) supports this notion of a peculiar context for “public”.
"There is a large myth out there that young people don't care about privacy. Young people care deeply about privacy but how they actually think through privacy looks very different than older folks." She sees both privacy AND publicity having value. The problem, says Lenhart, on the same panel, is that “everything is public by default… in a digital space, I don't have that ability to make those kinds of nuanced choices (of differentiated roles)”.

Commercialization of Social Media
Mnet’s Young C

anadians in a Wired World determined that 95% of young internet users’ popular sites are linked to commercial interests that require personal information for access to games and entertainment. Kids aren’t aware they are targets of embedded marketing. Additionally troubling is the ability of outside developers to create applications that require users to provide personal information that they would otherwise be reluctant to divulge to unknown persons. It is estimated that 95% of Facebook users have installed at least one application that also mines the user’s friend’s list even if that friend has not downloaded the application.

Changing Rules
In December, Facebook changed their default privacy settings and only 35% of users went out of their way t

o change theirs. “I think professionally and socially and personally, we're having to deal with a level of information persistence, information search ability, information replicability, information scalability, that we've never seen before” states boyd (2010).

While tech companies or regulations have a role to play, Belshaw argues that ultimately individuals need to take responsibility for what they publish. But boyd reminds us that friends in the broader social situation who may not have acted responsibly with your information may compromise your personal responsibility.

Implications for Teaching and Learning
The bottom line is that students must protect themselves. Palfrey & Gasser (2008) suggest a dynamic approach whereby

• Students use their connectedness to peer protect and educate
• Parents and teachers model credible and safe online lives
• Tech companies have clear data use policies with easy adjustable privacy settings
• Government standardize labeling for privacy policies
• Global laws reflect privacy protection and security needs
• Laws give users control over their data

Resources for Teachers

Media Awareness Network has updated lessons on privacy and a blog for students.

http://www.youthprivacy.ca/en/teachers.html

http://blog.privcom.gc.ca/index.php/privacy-on-social-networks/

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner recently launched a youth-oriented Web site titled myprivacy.mychoice.mylife.

Data Privacy Day 2010 is organized through Privacy.org, “Institutions and organizations around the globe join in the celebration in order to acknowledge the importance of maintaining some privacy in our use of technologies…”

Despite a wealth of resources for schools teachers struggle to find the time to formally teach privacy issues. And sadly a local incident needs to occur before students are sufficiently motivated to care. When one of my parenting students to her dismay discovered her estranged boyfriend had located her through a Facebook friend, she had to seek a restraining order to keep him away from her and her baby and desperately tried to scrub her online accounts. Peer teaching through the lived context is an effective if costly way of teaching students privacy awareness.

So while these resources are useful, they are likely most effective within the context of social media. I’ll give the last word to dana boyd and her delicious underscoring of the irony in that statement.

And what's really interesting in all of this is that adults [spent] all this time for the past five years telling young people this is a dangerous, dangerous place. Don't talk to strangers…But now, I love that all of these organizations…are now trying to go and reach young people through the social media.