Social media users becoming more wary of what they upload says Digital Analytics Association founder Jim Sterne
A backlash has begun when it comes to social media users freely handing over their personal information online, analyst Jim Sterne has claimed.
While speaking at this year's eMetrics conference, Sterne, founder of The Digital Analytics Association, claimed that he was seeing the sea change in attitudes towards the information that was being freely handed over by social media users as employers begin to look at their profiles while hiring.
"Generation Y was 'let's post everything on Facebook', because when Facebook happened they were 14 years old and their prefrontal cortex with their inhibitors weren't fully grown, so they posted everything, including pictures of them drunk in the gutter," explained Sterne, who added that these pictures then saw potential employers discount them as a result.
"We're seeing that the next generation is being very careful about what they are putting online, they are creating personas for themselves in different locations, and the younger set, as we saw happen with MySpace, it became uncool, so they went over to Facebook," he continued. "Then older people moved to LinkedIn as they were entering the business world. The desire to reveal themselves started happening in narrower and narrower segments and it's probably the biggest growing area for that age group now."
Sterne then highlighted the growth in use of SnapChat, which allows users to send a picture that is deleted in 15 seconds and can't be sent to anywhere else.
"Kids are really happy with that as dad can't log in'" he continued. "The challenge is what age you got involved in all of this, 'Tell me a little bit about yourself and I'll provide a service' - for my age group we're just negotiating it. For Generation Y, they don't know if they can trust sites because there is a back door to the NSA, but a 14-year old will tell them anything and make up information just to receive the free stuff - garbage data," Sterne added.
Sterne revealed his insight days after Snap Chat posted a blog to admit that it was handing over unopened messages to police that have not been deleted from the servers, run by Google, after 30 days.