Facebook has defended its decision to make the posts of its teenage users more visible, claiming that “teenagers are expert at controlling who they share things with”.
The social networking site says that it has tightened privacy settings for users aged between 13 to 17, restricting the sharing of posts to friends only by default. The previous default included friends of friends, who might not be directly known by the user.
The company has also introduced “additional tools to help educate teens on the implications of sharing a post with a public audience, with reminders as they post”, explained a Facebook spokesperson.
“This means they have to make a conscious choice before they share publicly. When teens choose ‘public’ in the audience selector, they’ll see a reminder that the post can be seen by anyone, not just people they know, with an option to change the post’s privacy.
“We think it is better that teens can choose to share publicly on Facebook than spend time elsewhere on the web where safety tools and resources are limited.”
Since December 2009, younger users of the site have been able only to share posts, pictures and updates with a limited selection of the social network: friends, friends of friends, and other members of their school, college and verified networks. This applied even if the young person told the site to share certain updates with “everyone”.
Those restrictions have now been removed, allowing teens to have the same control over their privacy settings as everyone else, so that photos and status updates can be made fully searchable.
A little under 10% of users don’t change the privacy settings applied when they sign up at all, and so the default setting has a great effect on the amount of data they share. Even for those who do change their settings, the default plays a role in anchoring perceptions.
“The National Crime Agency welcomes the announcement in relation to the default sharing setting,” said Facebook's spokesperson, adding that it “will help young people understand the need to manage their privacy settings carefully and to control who they share their information with".
Around 20% of Facebook’s UK users are aged between 15 and 24, according to an analysis by the firm ComScore, but the exact number affected by the changed settings isn’t known outside Facebook.
“While we don't believe all our young people will necessarily choose to post public updates,” said anti-bullying campaigner Alex Holmes, “we know that being able to do so on Facebook as on other platforms is important to them.”
Tony Neate, the chief executive of Get Safe Online, concurred. “Kids have been asking for this functionality because the way they use social media is fundamentally different to older generations, even those just three or four years older. And of course Facebook is going to give their users what they want.”
The company remains one of the few social networks to offer any extra privacy features at all to younger users. On the vast majority of networks, including Twitter, Instagram (owned by Facebook) and Google Plus, privacy settings are the same no matter what the user's age is. Some, such as Twitter, don’t even ask how old a new member is.
“Obviously they have to be able to compete with Twitter,” said Lizzie Dean, a secondary school student from Manchester who has been on Facebook since she was 14. “I actually use Twitter more, but you know the views are going to be shared publicly there.”
She also argued for an understanding of the rights at stake. “Why shouldn’t teenagers have the ability to share as much as adults do? We’re predominant users of it. We know what we’re doing.”
Dylan Collins, an entrepreneur who creates digital products for children, agreed. “We generally see kids being pretty cautious with this stuff. They've grown up with these platforms as digital natives, so I think they absorb the changes with less drama than older generations.”
“The way young people use the web has changed dramatically,” said a Facebook spokesperson. “We know from their use of Facebook that teenagers are expert at controlling who they share things with. In recent years we’ve seen the rise of services that enable teens to share with a public audience – often as a default setting.
"We’re giving teens the choice to share some of their posts with public audiences if they want to, so that they can join public conversations that might range from politics and activism through to sport or television.”
All major social networks require users to be at least 13 years old, thanks to a requirement under a US law called the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA. That law vastly increased the regulatory burden involved in letting children sign up for accounts online, with the result that most websites simply changed their terms of service to prevent people younger than 13 from signing up.
“Creating good, practical legal frameworks for kids online is a huge challenge,” said Collins. “I think it's made even more difficult by the experience gap between the people creating the law and the people [children] whose activities it tries to protect.”
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