The role of parents, media, teachers and peers in raising the awareness of privacy-issues on social networks

We are witnessing the rapid growth of a new generation of participatory and collaborative network technologies that provide individuals with a platform for sophisticated online social interaction. Social networks today have hundreds of millions of users and are transforming our social and professional interactions and to some extent are shaping society itself. By the end of 2008, 38% of people aged 15-25 in Europe had profiles on multiple social computing sites (Punie et al., 2009). This causes a growing concern about security and privacy issues in social networks, particularly with youngsters (De Moor et al., 2008; ENISA, 2007). That is why we propose a short talk about the safe use of social networks by youngsters, in which we focus on the role of parents, media, teachers and peers in raising the awareness of privacy-issues. Moreover, we discuss the question if this awareness guarantees safer social network-behavior. We will shortly present the results of our research in Flanders (Belgium), followed by a discussion about how different information sources can contribute and have a responsibility in teaching our children safe social network behavior. The subject of this talk fits perfectly in the theme of “Emerging Platforms and Policies”, since we discuss some questions about privacy and safety related to the use of this platforms by young people.