A New Privacy Paradox: Young People and Privacy on Social Network Sites

There is a widespread impression that younger people are less concerned with privacy than older people. For example, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg justified changing default privacy settings to allow everyone to see and search for names, gender, city and other information by saying “Privacy is no longer a social norm”. We address this question and test it using a representative sample from Britain based on the Oxford Internet Survey (OxIS). Contrary to conventional wisdom, OxIS shows a negative relationship between age and privacy; young people are actually more likely to have taken action to protect their privacy than older people. Privacy online is a strong social norm. We develop a sociological theory of privacy that accounts for the fact of youth concern. The new privacy paradox is that these sites have become so embedded in the social lives of users that they must disclose information on them despite the fact that these sites do not provide adequate privacy controls.