Facebook teens' kimonos - basically never closed Teenaged kids are handing out more private information on social media than ever before, with little thought for the consequences, a not-so-surprising survey has found. Teens are carelessly giving away phone numbers, pictures and other sensitive data using their Facebook accounts, the report by the Pew Foundation pointed out …
"At the same time, 40 per cent of adolescents have not set up the full privacy settings on Facebook to shutter their stuff from the prying eyes of teachers, advertisers, employers or paedos. About 14 per cent do not bother to use any privacy settings at all, the survey found."
"our" braindead kids haven't got a clue. They have grown up being bombarded by consumerism, turning them into mindless zomies. Not that 95% of english parents can actually see what is going on because they have been sucked in too.
Unfortunately, you can give some kids all the training you like, but they will still go ahead and make an idiot of themselves on the interwebs. It's because they think they know best and that all adults are stupid. It's a side-effect of being a teenager.
I agree on requiring licences for breeding though. There should probably be risk assessment forms and environmental impact statements to complete too. Dangerous critters, kids are.
This perfectly describes my approach to clothes:
At first, when I got [them], I was worried about my privacy settings, and my parents were too. [So I kept them on.] And then, after I had [them] for a while, I wasn't really worried as much. So then I took most of them off.”
My coat, Officer? It's probably under the jeans and T-shirt in the corner.
"...The stress of needing to manage their reputation on Facebook also contributes to the lack of enthusiasm."
Facebook's eventual slide into MySpace like irrelevance probably starts with that sentence. The more Zuck and co have to push to get people to divvy up the ad bait, the more effort will be needed by the user to avoid like a total bell end through their own or others posted material. Eventually it'll just be too much like hard work for no discernible reward except more advertising, and teenagers will start to leave - and if there's one thing they have in spades, its the herd instinct. Parents and grandparents, previously derided as uncool for NOT having a facebook account will presumably then be derided as uncool for having one and will also be free to quit. By the time Tory MPs start to quit in droves, the game really will be up and Zuck can slip quietly back into well deserved mediocrity, and the rest of us can wait in dread to see what the next round of social media fascism brings.
I'm reminded of Terry Pratchett's "Reaper Man", and the song "We Shall Overcome*".
* A song which, in various languages, is common on every known world in the multiverse. It is always sung by the same people, viz, the people who, when they grow up, will be the people who the next generation sing "We Shall Overcome" at.
"What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?"
Very simple. They get older..."go forth and multiply"...and end up asking the very same questions 30 years from now.
EVERY "great civilization" eventually crumbles...nothing different here. Simply a matter of time before it happens once more.
Fortunately...my wife & I have had no children...and we'll be looking UP at the daisies when it does.
Is it just they are behaving stupidly? Which admittedly is a given with teenagers.
They are also now being brought up in an environment that trains them to give away their details.
They haven't even got lessons from other countries set ups like the old soviet era states, I wonder how many classes still even teach animal farm or 1984, and then considering back to my teenage years when we did get that I wonder if I would have done any better anyway.
Its a bunch of sophisticated adults and the underbelly of society, against teenagers who haven't grown up to learn yet and adults who haven't been able to catch up with the tech changes and so can't advise them, (and how often did you listen to your parents anyway?).
I have long been bewildered by what information younger people (as in younger 20-somethings) will happily flaunt to the world in their blogs and online journal postings, and what information they will choose to hide. I sometimes hire artists online to create artwork for me on commission, and while looking for ways to contact them I will often find that useful information such as their e-mail addresses will be nowhere to be found, but yet they will have a Tumblr blog or something similar where they will happily write about personal things that I wouldn't even be comfortable asking my best friend about. Things such as medical information like what anti-depression and anti-psychotic drugs that they are currently taking, details about personal life problems, and/or what their sex lives are like in *extremely* graphic detail (and sometimes illustrated with photos)-- all things that I never wanted to know about them, and in many cases, wished that I could find a way to "un-know" about them. I mean honestly, all I wanted to know was how much it would cost me to hire this person to draw something-- I didn't need to come across a detailed written account about what they did to their boyfriend the night before with their tongue while trying to seek that information out. But they will use the same blog or social networking site for both types of information, so there is no avoiding it!
These people seem to forget that leaving this overly personal information out on the Net is kind of like getting an easily-seen lewd body tattoo-- sure, they may enjoy all of the attention and comments that they're getting for it right now, but just wait until they try to walk into a job interview once they get out of college-- many companies research a candidate's online presence these days, and they may not appreciate a candidate blogging about all of their favorite sexual fetishes as much as the candidate's blog's "followers" do. And with Google and Archive.org saving everything in perpetuity, any scandalous web presence that a person may have, even from many years ago, is an even more difficult mistake to get rid of than that lewd tattoo would be. I wonder if any of these people take that into account at all before they post these intimate details about themselves because they are potentially tying their own ropes to hang themselves with later in life if they don't!
Stupid teenagers without a clue about "privacy" and "data mining" are Zuckerberg's bread and butter. That's exactly why they regularly monkey with the privacy settings "accidentally" turning them off so often...it's not like the distracted hordes of clueless teen privacy nudists will even notice.
I've seen both sides of this -- I saw some teens getting ready to post photos of themselves, in an area that was off limits to begin with, drinking beers. I'm like "Facebook's a public site you know, and anyone could see these photos". They just were like "You worry too much, don't sweat it" and did anyway.
On the other hand, there ARE others who realize they are telling everyone on the planet what they do when they post to facebook, and will not do it. I *have* seen younger people who still realize this, they aren't all lost.
Unfortunately, many people in the US has a sick attitude when it comes to privacy these days. If someone posts, say, "I believe in the right to privacy", reasonable people will either say "well, of course". If someone then says "Be careful what information you give to google" or "I don't post to facebook", though, THEN some real smartasses come out of the woodwork and suggest adjusting your tinfoil hat, watch out for the mind control rays, and so on... i.e. they think anyone taking any precautions to maintain privacy is some sort of nutter. I've seen this again and again.
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