Information Privacy Attitudes and Policies, Young Adults vs Older Adults
Posted by Celia Walter | 22 Apr, 2010Information Privacy Attitudes and Policies, How Different are Young Adults from Older Adults When It Comes to Attitudes and Policies?
By: Chris Jay Hoofnagle
University of California, Berkeley – School of Law, Berkeley Center for
Law & Technology
Jennifer King
UC Berkeley School of Information; Berkeley Center for Law &
Technology
Su Li
University of California, Berkeley- School of Law, Center for the Study
of Law and Society
Joseph Turow
University of Pennsylvania – Annenberg School for Communication
Media reports teem with stories of young people posting salacious photos online, writing about alcohol-fueled misdeeds on social networking sites, and publicizing other ill-considered escapades that may haunt them in the future. These anecdotes are interpreted as representing a generation-wide shift in attitude toward information privacy. Many commentators therefore claim that young people “are less concerned with maintaining privacy than older people are.” Surprisingly, though, few empirical investigations have explored the privacy attitudes of young adults. This report is among the first quantitative studies evaluating young adults’ attitudes. It demonstrates that the picture is more nuanced than portrayed in the popular media.
[Snip]
A gap in privacy knowledge provides one explanation for the apparent license with which the young behave online. 42 percent of young Americans answered all of our five online privacy questions incorrectly. 88 percent answered only two or fewer correctly. The problem is even more pronounced when presented with offline privacy issues – post hoc analysis showed that young Americans were more likely to answer no questions correctly than any other age group.
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