Adults’ Influence on Early Adolescents’ Digital Privacy Practices

• In Event: Shaping Early Adolescents’ Digital Media Use: Diversity in Philosophies, Approaches, and Links with Psychosocial Outcomes

Abstract

Increasingly, adults are concerned about privacy issues as children engage with a variety of connected technologies. While recommendations about teaching privacy are plentiful (from parenting books to educational websites), little of it considers how adults model the online behaviors that they would like their children to adopt. These literature gaps are greatest for “tweens”, who tend to be relatively new social media users. To date, research on young adolescents’ (6th-8th grade) knowledge about privacy and privacy practices have not been well explored, especially how these young users learn about privacy and how adults facilitate this learning. Using survey data from 466 middle-schoolers, we explore their privacy knowledge and practices as well as how adults teach and model privacy-protecting behaviors on social media.

Most tweens (76%) reported that someone had discussed digital privacy with them. Typically, this was a parent (56%), teacher (42.5%), friend (36%) or sibling (28%). Many practiced multiple privacy behaviors – from not sharing personal information to using VPN connections. Considering social media use specifically, tweens reported how often their parents and other adults posted pictures of them and when they did, the frequency of adults showing the youth what they were posting, asking for permission before posting, and not sharing private information. Youth also reported how often they posted pictures of friends and the frequency with which they showed the post to the friend first, asked permission, or considered how the friend looked. From this, we used OLS regressions to assess whether adult (parents and others) social media privacy-protecting behaviors and teaching about privacy predicted youths’ posting behaviors after controlling for child age.

Most youth (81%) reported that their parents posted about them and 61% reported that other adults posted about them as well. However, parents’ privacy-protecting behaviors varied greatly from never (9%) to always (37%). Of the youth surveyed, 65% had a social media account and of those, 69% had posted about a friend. Similar to the adults, youths’ privacy-protecting behaviors ranged from never (20%) to always (34%). In considering how adult behavior predicted youth behavior, we found that when parents (B=0.34, SE=0.15, p=0.02) and other adults (B=0.31, SE=0.15, p=.04) used more privacy-protecting behaviors and talked to youth about privacy (B=0.29, SE=0.09, p<.001), tweens were more likely to engage in these behaviors as well (adjR2=0.25). For instance, the more often parents asked permission to post (B=.35, SE=0.09, p<.001), the more likely youth were to ask as well (adjR2=0.31) and adults showing posts before posting (B=.23, SE=0.09, p=.01) increased the likelihood that youth would too (adjR2=0.12). Interestingly, child age was not related to privacy behaviors.

This survey suggests that tweens’ privacy-protecting behaviors are likely shaped by the important adults in youths’ lives. To date, most research exploring how parents’ model and support children’s media habits have focused on young children (Coyne et al., 2017), with research on older youth targeting mediation and monitoring practices (Wisniewski et al., 2015). As new users of social media, considering how adults may directly AND indirectly shape privacy practices is important to consider.

Authors

• Stephanie M Reich, University of California - Irvine
  Presenting Author

• Allison Starks, University of California - Irvine
  Non-Presenting Author

• Nicholas Santer, University of California, Santa Cruz
  Non-Presenting Author

• Adriana Maria Manago, University of California - Santa Cruz
  Non-Presenting Author