After yesterday's post about efforts to educate teens and tweens on managing their online reputations, Facebook may have made this easier to do. Reiterating the survey I cited yesterday, the reality is that most users of social networking sites are concerned about privacy but have no idea how to really manage their settings. Part of the problem is that currently on Facebook, you have to go to your privacy settings and literally click through multiple pages to determine who sees what. The new privacy settings (eloquently described in this New York Times piece, reg. required), which will roll out soon, offer users the ability to decide whether or not to share (and with whom) every status update, video or photo as part of the process of posting it to the site.

This means that the education happening around reputation management will need to emphasize what it means to share content with "everyone" (your friends and any other "minor" on Facebook under 18), just with all of your friends or just with specific friends. The key difference for adults 18 and up is everyone means everyone both inside and outside of Facebook. Facebook users under 18 are not indexed in Google but can be found on Facebook by anyone (not just minors) unless they change that default setting. In order to actively manage your online rep, you have to pay attention to the privacy icon (a little lock) that will now appear every time you post. danah boyd wrote a great post last year imploring Facebook to make their settings more contextual — it appears they've done this.

In some ways the settings on MySpace, while offering less flexibility, are still just easier to manage. You're either public to the world or private to your friends. MySpace default settings for users who are under 18 (or who aren't lying about their age) are private, but can be changed to public.

No matter how much time you spend talking about settings, the key message for teens and tweens is that sites can always be hacked creating loopholes, friends can become frienemies and anything you post digitally can ultimately be copied, pasted and forwarded.

I found this post really helpful for anyone on Facebook who is concerned about privacy but is at a loss for how to protect your profile.

Categorized under: Teens, Web

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