Is Privacy No Longer a Social Norm for Digital Natives?
‘People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people…that social norm is just something that has evolved over time.’
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook
Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook made these controversial comments back in San Fransisco, 2010. It raised many important questions for users of the internet regarding privacy policies and data protection. The main question that passed through the minds of many, however, was ‘is he right?’
Data Protection and Our Society
It is a widely believed assumption that young people in particular are far too comfortable with sharing their private lives online, especially through social media outlets. The younger generation are what is known as ‘digital natives’: those born or brought up during the age of digital technology and so are familiar with the internet from an early age. For this generation, using social media to share our everyday or personal experiences with friends and family seems of a second nature. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram are all great ways of communicating with our loved ones and creating online communities which we can actively engage in. It may be fair to comment that most people don’t think about the implications of these platforms.
‘I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time… The internet is the first thing humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand. (It is) the largest experiment in anarchy we’ve ever had’.
Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google
Internet security and the breaching of privacy have been extremely topical in the UK over the last few years. The 2016 Investigatory Powers Act was nicknamed ‘The Snoopers Charter’ by the general public. The act was passed by both the Houses of Parliament and the Queen and, according to a Business Insider article, ‘ gives British intelligence agencies the legal right to conduct mass surveillance on people in the UK’. The bill was extremely controversial, clashing with many EU laws regarding privacy. The backlash from the mass media provided debate around whether internet surveillance was ‘right or wrong’. A discussion in my Digital Society lecture about this issue received mixed opinions. Some felt that if we as citizens have ‘nothing to hide’, then analysing our data had more benefits which outweighed the costs. Others felt this was intrusive and it is our human right to have personal privacy and our data protected.
More recently, data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica and social media giant Facebook have been accused of using customers personal data gathered through an online personality quiz to influence the American Presidential Election. It was reported by the BBC that ‘over 1.1 million Brits had also been affected by the scandal’.
Young People and their Perceived Attitude Towards Data Protection
It’s unquestionable that the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal was immoral — and not one person in my lecture questioned it. But one prevailing thought that sprung to my mind was, if something as significant as this was what it took to cross the line, where was the line to begin with? Is it true that I, along with other digital natives, have become completely passive and comfortable with previous breaching and invasion of my privacy?
I considered whether the younger generation were aware of the truth behind the information we give to the internet, in particular on social media sites. On Twitter, I came across memes which mocked data protection, suggesting that young people are fully aware of the consequences but are ‘comfortable’ enough to take the topic light-heartedly.
The Truth Behind Young People and the Internet
Despite the memes, is it entirely true that people are less concerned about this issue than we believe, in particular young people? A 2013 Pew Study found that 50% of internet users were worried about the information which may be available about them online, significantly rising from 30% in 2009. A Washington Post ABC poll also reported, following an NSA leak, that 40% of US respondents said it was more important to protect privacy even if it limited the ability for the government to investigate terror threats. This was a similar result to the class discussion I mentioned earlier, in which around half of the class disagreed that the benefits of sharing private information outweighed the costs.
It is important to remember that these statistics reflect ‘internet users’, which might well be majority digital natives. We can therefore question that, despite popular beliefs, it’s possible that the younger generation might be more concerned about protecting personal privacy than we think.
A study from the Global Cyber Security Capacity Centre and Oxford University wanted to test this. They assessed 5 different age groups across different nations (Australia, UK and US) and their likelihood of protecting personal information online. The report found that 18–24 year olds were actually the most likely group to change their privacy settings, with only 6% of Australians reporting to have never adjusted their settings, compared to 16–20% in the US and UK. They concluded that ‘young people are more, not less likely to have taken action to protect the privacy of their personal information on social networking sites’. Suggesting that, although young people might share their private information online, they are also a lot more likely to change their privacy settings to protect themselves.
Reflection
I am a digital native. I was brought up with the familiarity of technology and admit I am very dependent on my digital devices. Before I enrolled as a student on The Digital Society module, I could barely name any consequences from using the internet and did not understand the scale of security and privacy breaches that were happening in this country. As a Fashion Marketing student, my main reason for enrolling on the unit was to gain a better understanding of digital tools and how this can benefit the digital marketing industry. The learning objectives I set myself were entirely commercial. As a marketing student and young person who should be familiar with all things digital, I quickly began to question how much I really knew about the internet.
During the unit, I have learnt a lot about how technology has and will improve digital marketing. It was interesting to see how the adoption of digital technology can be healthily embraced to gauge the interest of the public without any immoral consequences. One of my favourite examples of this was Pepsi Max’s bus shelter campaign which used an augmented reality feature at a bus-stop to inform and entertain those waiting for the bus.
The unit also, however, opened my eyes to how large firms like Facebook or Amazon use technology for marketing in ways that can be viewed as immoral. The Financial Times recently reported that things such as ‘supermarket shopping, photographs, opinions, likes, dislikes and friendship networks…salary, age, address, pension, job applications and national insurance numbers’ were all examples of the personal information that is stored by retailers/social media giants to tailor digital marketing ads to users.
In a Digital Society lecture, we had a discussion about the morality regarding this issue. One student suggested that actually, tailored adverts that used our web history are ‘useful when accurate’. I immediately agreed, and as a Fashion student you can probably imagine my Facebook adverts are a blessing when they inform me of a sale at ASOS or River Island! It only occurred to me later in the discussion that Facebook, Amazon and other companies were, in fact, profiting from my private information which I hadn’t even agreed to share in the first place. I began to think about how much of my web history was stored, and if so where? And more importantly, who was viewing it?
Going into the future, particularly within my future career in marketing and fashion, I will take what I have learnt in Digital Society to try and ‘make my mark’ within the industry, ensuring the work I associate myself with is ethical. On a personal level, I have become more critical about the internet and, in future, will make more of an effort to update my privacy settings, keep closer tabs on the news and finally, share what I have learnt with other people — with all generations, both digital natives and immigrants.