Privacy backlash sees Facebook users shy away from share all mentality
Facebook users are increasingly adopting a more cautious approach to sharing content online, according to new research conducted by the Market Research Society.
This found that younger users in particular are keeping private data closer to their chest by ‘untagging’ pictures they appear in to prevent all and sundry from clapping eyes upon them. Others go even further by intentionally presenting false information to disguise their true activities or even operating secondary secret accounts.
Such behaviour flies in the face of pronouncements from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who confidently predicted back in 2010 that privacy was no longer a ‘social norm’.
The report noted: “There is an almost universally held view that teenagers simply don’t care enough about online privacy and this can have disastrous consequences.”
It follows a number of high profile cases in which teenagers have come a cropper after posting ill-advised messages online; including the salutary tale of Paris Brown who came unstuck as the country’s first youth police crime commissioner who was forced to resign in 2013 over a series of colourful archive tweets.