How Social Media Ignores Children’s Privacy

While a considerable amount of research and guidance is offered on limiting children’s social media access regarding issues like cyberbullying, overconsumption of online media, exposure to inappropriate material, few of these articles revolve around another critical aspect of keeping children safe and secure in cyberspace. We’re talking about the intrusion into their privacy and mining of their data. While discussions around these topics have been rising, they rarely focus on young people, typically seen as a ‘business only’ threat. Nothing could be further from the truth. Today, we take a look at the deeper issues. Our Most Vulnerable Demographic: We all want to keep our children safe on social media. However, we are guilty of missing the wood for the trees by failing to include privacy issues in that conversation. The youth are, by far, the most digital generation yet- over 90% of teens aged 13-17 engage with social media regularly. And, as a younger and more vulnerable demographic, knowledge of critical protective behaviors, let alone implementation of safer strategies, is among the lowest. It’s more than understandable that parents typically engage with other social media risks in these conversations, most notably cyberbullying and toxic peer-to-peer behavior, as well as the risks of exposure to online predators. However, failing to include data theft and breach of privacy in those predatory behaviors can have drastic and long-term effects on the safety and privacy of your child’s data. Why Youth are Particularly Vulnerable In the teen demographic, we already know that full brain development is not yet complete. In particular, risk-reward pathways in the brain and the ability to fully conceptualize and apply them to understand personal risk are still developing. We all remember the heady feeling of being invulnerable and untouchable by tragedy! Likewise, most teens find themselves under intense peer pressure to conform to the ‘cool norm’ of their era and do what their peers do to stay in the loop. This means assessing risk and understanding why key protective behaviors like not revealing personal information to strangers often fall by the wayside as they rush to stay ‘in’ with friends and avoid peer judgment. Nebulous ideas of cybercriminals poised to mine that data so glibly revealed seem far less problematic than whether Jenny from Science Class thinks they’re hot and happening! Social Media Failures The modern pull of social media is a strong one. We see adults regularly overshare and indulge in unsafe behaviors that leave them open to cybercrime. Most of these platforms actively encourage this vast overshare of personal information. After all, social media marketing has become incredibly lucrative, and the more data they can mine about all of us, the more targeting they can offer advertising partners. It doesn’t pay for them to provide tight security and minimal data intrusion, as that’s the bread-and-butter that keeps these platforms going. The net result? An incredible risk of loss of sensitive data. Add to it youthful inexperience, often leading teens to practice unsafe behavior like sending data and photos to strangers, and you have a toxic mix. And there’s little incentive for social media platforms to disincentivize this social overshare. For now, as it becomes impossible to keep our children off social media entirely. All we can do is be proactive in having the right conversations with children, monitor their online habits, and ensure their accounts are locked down. Coupled with intelligent use of third-party protective programs and behaviors, such as secure VPNs, we can at least mitigate the risks to our youth that social media platforms simply don’t care about.

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How Social Media Ignores Children’s Privacy

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