Teens, Privacy & Online Social Networks

The latest Pew Internet & American Life report came out this past Thursday:

Teens, Privacy & Online Social Networks: How teens manage their online identities and personal information in the age of MySpace.

I don’t know what it is about these reports, but I find them absolutely fascinating.  They attempt to quantify trends in Internet usage and some statistics that they come up with are sometimes quite surprising.  (You can find my previous two report write-ups here: Pew on Blogging and Pew Report on Teens and Technology.)  Without further adieu, let us delve into what I thought were the interesting parts of this report.  I dig through 45 pages so you don’t have to–feel free to peruse through the interesting parts and then jump down to the bottom of the post for a bit of commentary.  (NB: All underlining is mine.)

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Part 1: Internet Use and Teens’ Computing Environments

MySpace was by no means the first social networking application to come to the fore, but it has been the fastest-growing, and now consistently draws more traffic than almost any other website on the internet. …

Social networking sites appeal to teens, in part, because they encompass so many of the online tools and entertainment activities that teens know and love. They provide a centralized control center to access real-time and asynchronous communication features, blogging tools, photo, music and video sharing features, and the ability to post original creative work – all linked to a unique profile that can be customized and updated on a regular basis. However, in order to reap the benefits of socializing and making new friends, teens often disclose information about themselves that would normally be part of a gradual “getting-to-know-you” process offline (name, school, personal interests, etc.). …

… However, the type of “friending” activity that occurs on social networking sites, where users link to one another’s profiles to grow their networks, highlights the radically changing notion of what it means to be acquainted with someone. It is so compelling to some teens to display big friendship networks and so easy with a click or two to establish online connections that it is possible for teens to have virtual ties to others on social networks whom they have never met in person.

American teenagers continue to lead the trend towards ubiquitous internet connectivity in the U.S.

• According to our latest survey, 93% of all Americans between 12 and 17 years old use the internet. In 2004, 87% were internet users, and in 2000, 73% of teens went online.
• Teens whose parents are less educated and have lower incomes are less likely to be online than teens with more affluent and well-educated parents.
• Home continues to be the primary location where teens access the internet. However, there are still notable numbers of teens, especially those in lower income or single parent households, who report using the internet most often from school, the library, or a friend or relative’s house.
• More and more teens have broadband connections at home. Three-quarters of all online teens live in households with broadband internet access, up from 50% of online teens with broadband in 2004. Just a quarter of online teens have dial-up internet access at home.
• As we found in 2004, teens who have active lives offline are also active online. For instance, teens who are involved in after school activities such as sports, band, drama club, or church go online with greater frequency than teens who have fewer extracurricular commitments.

Many parents take online safety precautions with their teenage children.

• More than half of parents with online teens have a filter installed on their computer at home.
• Monitoring software is not as popular as filters, but is still used by 45% of parents with online teens.
• Teens are also relatively aware of monitoring software on their home computers, though less aware than they are of filtering.  …  Many filtering packages warn users when the software is blocking content, while monitoring packages often work silently in the background.
• Parents who have a more positive view of technology in their lives and those who own more types of personal technology (cell phones, PDAs) are more likely to use monitoring software on the computer their child uses at home.

Parents also employ a wide array of non-technical protections and behaviors to protect their teens.

• As we found in 2004, about two-thirds of parents (65%) of online teens report that they “check up” on their child after he or she has gone online.
• Teens in the other, less-monitored third of online teens, explain how knowledge imbalance affects oversight in the home.
• Three-quarters of home computers are in a public place in the home.
• … in comparison to other types of media with in the home, the internet is a much more regulated piece of technology than the television or video game console.

Despite all the rules parents impose on internet use, parents still think that the internet is a good thing for their child.

Overall, 59% of parents of online teens say that the internet is a positive addition to their children’s lives. Still, the percentage of parents who think that the internet is good for their children has decreased a statistically significant amount from 67% in 2004 to 59% in 2006. However, that does not mean that more parents today are more “anti-internet” than they were two years ago. Instead, more parents have become ambivalent; in 2006, 30% said that they did not think that the internet had an effect on their children one way or the other, compared with 25% who reported this in 2004.

Part 2: Teens and Online Social Networks

• More than half or 55% of all online American teens use social networks. [DevDuck: Wow!]
• MySpace dominates the social networking realm, with more than 85% of teens with online profiles saying that the profile they use or update the most resides on that site. Following on its heels is Facebook, with 7% of profile-owners updating their Facebook profile most regularly.
• Almost half of teens who use social networks, visit them once a day (26%) or several times a day (22%).

Parents usually know if their teen has a profile online.

Social networks provide public and private communication tools.

• The most popular way of communicating via social networking sites is to post a message or comment to a friend’s profile, page or “wall.” More than 4 in 5 social network users (84%) have posted messages to a friend’s profile or page. “It’s a nice feeling to get, like, comments,” said an early high school-aged boy.
• 82% send private messages to a friend within the social networking system.
• 76% post comments to a friend’s blog.
• 61% send a bulletin or group message to all of their friends.
• 33% wink, poke, give "e-props" or kudos to friends.

Social networks provide affirmation and feedback for teens.

• Teens get to feel like they are a part of a group of like-minded friends, and can visualize their network of relationships, displaying their popularity for others.
• “It is a great feeling. Like if you go on there and you haven’t been on in a day and you don’t find anything in the box, you don’t want to be on there anymore but if you go on there and there’s a new picture, comments, people want to talk to you, you start feeling part of a group.” — Boy, Early High School  [DevDuck: Can you say "News Feed"??]

Part 3: Online Privacy: What Teens Share and Restrict in an Online Environment

What is okay to share online? Teens prefer to keep it vague.

• They felt that, for the most part, there was not enough information in the photos posted, even when combined with the information contained in the profile, to compromise their privacy or safety. Other teens told us that they had set their profiles to private or deliberately made their age younger to achieve a higher level of restricted access built into the social network they use.
• A mere 2% of teens have posted their ultra-personal cell phone number to their online profile.

Few teens disclose their full name on public profiles.

• 26% of teens with online profiles post their full names. However, most of these teens who include their full name restrict access to their profile; just 6% of online teens and 11% of profile-owning teens post their first and last name to a publicly viewable profile that is visible to anyone online.

Girls and boys have different levels of disclosure on their online profiles.

• Girls are more likely than boys to say that they have posted photos both of themselves and of their friends onto their online profile. Boys are more likely to say they have posted the city or town where they live, their last name and their cell phone number when compared with girls.
• When teens, particularly girls, talked about protection of their privacy online, their main concern was the protection of their physical self – if a piece of information could easily lead to them being contacted in person, girls would not share it readily.
• When teens, particularly girls, talked about protection of their privacy online, their main concern was the protection of their physical self – if a piece of information could easily lead to them being contacted in person, girls would not share it readily

Older teens share more personal information than younger teens.

In an offline setting, teens are most guarded about their phone numbers.

Teens are more likely to say it is okay to share certain types of personal information in an offline social situation than they are to actually post that information to their online profile.

• In our focus groups, teens told us they are generally more comfortable sharing information at a party because they have much more contextual information in an offline setting than an online one …
• … we asked teens whether or not they were surprised by the material that some of their peers posted to their social networking profile. Some online teens expressed shock at the nature and content of some postings.

More than half of teens post false information in online profiles.

• While over half (54%) of teens who have profiles that are visible to anyone say that they have entirely truthful information on their profile, just 39% of teens with friends-only profiles say that everything posted to their profile is true.
• Rural teens are more likely to be fully truthful on their online profiles than their suburban or urban compatriots.

Half of all online teens and three-quarters of social networking teens post photos online.

• With the proliferation of digital cameras and cell phone cameras, in particular, many teens have the means to document the most mundane and profound moments of their lives.  [DevDuck: Great quote!]

Posting photos and videos starts a conversation. Most teens receive some feedback on the content they post online.

Teens and adults post content so that it might be seen by an audience, regardless of how that audience is limited by restrictions set on the content by the content poster. And sometimes that audience responds to the content posted online, making the content as much about interaction with others as it is about sharing with them.

Teenagers’ disclosure of personal information does not follow clear patterns.

Social network use and online self-presentations for teens combine the difficult recipe of tremendous facility with and enjoyment of technology, and a desire to meet, make and reinforce friendships, during a time of personal growth, risk-taking and testing.

Part 4: Friendship, Strangers and Safety in Online Social Networks

Most teens are using the networks to stay in touch with people they already know, either friends that they see a lot (91% of social networking teens have done this) or friends that they rarely see in person (82%).

Teens also use the online networks to make new friends; 49% of social network users (27% of online teens) say they use the networks to make new friends. Boys are more likely to report using the networks to make new friends than girls. Teens from middle and lower income families were more likely to say that they use the sites to make new friends than higher income teens.

For some teens, making friends on social networks is less about finding common ground, and more about avoiding giving offense. One middle school-aged girl told us “My friends will have friends that I don’t know. You look at them…Then you feel bad because they’re like, ‘Oh, well, I just saw you in this play, be my friend.’ And then you’re like, ‘Okay.’ All right, you know, why not.” Another middle school girl elaborated, “I mean, I’m not really making new friends, I’m just not hurting peoples’ feelings. If I know that they’re friends with someone else that I don’t feel like they’re [going to] come and attack me, and so it’s safe.”

16% of teens are connected to “friends” on social networking sites who they have not met in person. [31% of social networking teens]

Some un-met online friends are connected through other friends… [12% of online teens, 70% of social networking teens with un-met “friends”]

…Others have friends in their social networks that neither they nor their friends have ever met. [9% of online teens and a bit more than half (53%) of teens with un-met friends.]

32% of online teens have been contacted online by a complete stranger. Profile-owning teens are much more likely to have been contacted.

Most teens ignore or delete stranger contact and are not bothered by it. [65%]

Teens who use social networking sites to meet new friends are more accessible to strangers, but are no more likely to have experienced stranger contact that made them scared or uncomfortable.

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Commentary

Interesting report, no?  It’s interesting that many of the findings in these ‘Teen Reports’ apply as well to young adults and those that are technologically savvy.  A couple things I wanted to talk about:

Teens, in general, are not as clueless as you think.  They’re aware of the dangers of the internet (just like the dangers of hopping into a car with a stranger), no part in thanks to the wisdom indoctrinated into them by their parents.  Teens are also more likely to be more tech-savvy than their parents–at least in regard to trends like social networking.  This means that they take advantage of new tools that  allow them to interact with their peers.  Their parents can not always police them, and rely on their children’s better judgement and morals taught offline.

When I was in college I would go home several times a year for school breaks.  I found that my sister, in high school at the time, was on MSN Messenger 24/7 (well, nothing’s really changed) while attempting to do her homework.  She would stay up well past midnight trying to finish her work while chatting on IM.  Being the concerned older brother (who was also tech-savvy), I set a timer on the router to block all traffic to her laptop from 12 AM – 6 AM, before leaving to go back to college.  I thought it was ingenious, but she was kind of pissed that she would have to move to the desktop computer to work after midnight.  (At the same time I had concocted a packet sniffer that parsed out MSNP, but I’ll leave that for another time…)

I know a friend of a friend, whose son caught his sister buying marijuana from school friends.  The son managed to turn on Live Messenger’s chat logging feature and read through his sister’s IM conversations with these ‘friends’ to find proof (not to mention finding some worrisome fantasies).  Technology has certainly transformed the way people interact with one another and it can be used in compromising ways.  (In case you’re interested, the police did actually get involved, and eventually they sent the girl off to rehab somewhere where they dump you in the middle of the woods with a tent and a blanket [or something like that].)

It’s also interesting to compare and contrast this report’s findings with the Facebook audience (I don’t use MySpace), who (I think) are a slightly older crowd.  There, the idea of "networks" lessen the issue of privacy (although anyone now can join).  Very few people don’t display their full name or e-mail address.

Any other interesting conclusions?

Building and Operating a Large-scale Computing Infrastructure

Last night, Google Kirkland hosted a Tech Talk for Cornell CS alumni.

Building and Operating a Large-scale Computing Infrastructure

Google is quite a bit more than a typical Internet company in that we spend a significant effort architecting our computing infrastructure for maximum efficiency. In this talk we will discuss some of the challenges involved in handling failures and optimizing performance for large-scale services, and how dealing with such issues requires a broad range of expertise and the development of new, sophisticated tools.

About the Speaker:
Reza Behforooz is a Software Engineer at Google. He’s passionate about building large distributed systems and working on consumer facing communication products in an attempt to make the world a smaller place. Reza holds a BS from Cornell and a MS from Stanford in Computer Science. He occasionally blogs on http://www.rezab.com.

[ Aside: AC, who also graduated from my alma mater, is also Canadian, used to work in the same building I do now (but now works on the same floor as I used to work in Messenger), and works on AdCenter, wanted to carpool so I gave him a ride.  And we were wearing the *exact* same CK shirt.  What are the chances of that?!  I thought it was a pretty darn unique shirt as well.  ]

Anyway, the talk was largely a very high level overview of some of the challenges and solutions to building highly distributed services.  I didn’t really learn anything from it, but it did strike me, having intimate knowledge of how Live Messenger and Live Search work, that they both tackle the same issues (duh) and both came up with very similar solutions to the problem.  It’s like being presented with conquering the problem of flight.  Insects, birds, and mammals (eg. bats) all solve the problem using wings, but they all evolved differently and use slightly different mechanics.  [Note: I have absolutely no idea if the original group of people working on MSN Search studied how Goog purportedly built their system at the time.]  The problems?  Building fault tolerant systems on faulty hardware, monitoring health of the system, collecting diagnostic data, etc etc.

Other interesting observations: a large number of the Goog employees at the Kirkland office are Microsoft defectors (I know one or two myself).  I have nothing against these people, but it’s interesting how they like to talk about how much better it is to work at Goog than MS.  I’ll cede to the fact that not all MS employees are happy (Mini), but I think, with such a large company, things are mostly isolated to pockets of discontent (or pockets of content, depending on how you look at it).  It’ll be interesting to see what the Goog brain drain is like in the upcoming year.

Lots of colours in a Goog office: a yellow wall, red exercise balls, etc.  A massage room.  It’s been a while since I’ve seen a bunch of filing cabinets in the hallway..  Kind of cramped offices.  I’m happy with having an office all to myself with my Aeron chair.  🙂

It was fun seeing some alumni: one guy who I worked with in our Security class (but I couldn’t remember his name) now works at Amazon; some TAs, etc.

Cool evening in the dragon’s den. 😉

Twitter > Facebook

I’ve been playing around with Twitter in the past week and yesterday I wrote down some thoughts that compared it to Facebook (as I’ve been spending a fair amount of time on that site as well).  Yes, I realize that they (currently) target slightly different demographics, but I thought it was an interesting comparison nonetheless.  Last night, Facebook rolled out their new update, and it turns out it had some of the ‘logical next steps’ I was thinking about.  So I’ll try to put my thoughts into words here.  I haven’t read much about what other A-list bloggers think about Twitter so this could be a rehash of others’ stuff (or completely off the mark), but whatever.

So what is Twitter?

A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing? Answer on your phone, IM, or right here on the web!

As usual with new ‘Web 2.0’ start-ups, Twitter isn’t the only one with this idea; it is oft compared to Jaiku (more feature-rich) and Dodgeball (only mobile though).  I haven’t tried either of these services.  (I find signing-up for and trying the N combinations of ‘Web 2.0’ start-ups is very tiring; not to mention a colossal waste of time.)

I think Omar Shahine had a great analogy: E-mail is to Instant Messaging as Blogging is to Twitter.  Twitter fills a very niche market–subjects/topics that you would like to share but are too lightweight for a full-on blog post, be it interesting links, random thoughts, or funny happenings.  It’s like blogging on crack; if you’re an avid feed reader you could be posting a ton of links every day.  Nothing much out there today fills this niche.  So I think it’s here to stay.  Not "it" being Twitter itself, for I think Twitter is just a small collection of features (what’s its business model?), but the *idea* of a quick and dirty personal bulletin board.

In the context of things out there today, Twitter is a combination of Facebook’s status and news feed + notifications (SMS, IM) + Facebook’s Wall (public conversations).  (In fact, I was digging through Facebook’s API last night to see if their status could be combined with Twitter, and came to the conclusion it could.  A cursory search online this morning showed that, hell, someone’s already done it.)  So it would be a very natural progression for Facebook to rollout these features that make up Twitter.  I thought their news feeds and mini-feeds were genius when they came out, and I was surprised that they hadn’t taken the logical next steps and made these feeds subscribable in a common RSS reader.  With Facebook’s rollout last night, it turns out that you still can’t subscribe to your news feed or mini-feed, but you *can* subscribe to your friends’ status and posted items.

So Twitter *itself* probably won’t last.  They don’t have a business model (since they don’t get a cut from the cellular carriers).  140 characters is annoying.  And without more fine grained control, Twitter can become overwhelming and/or boring.  Do I really care what my friends had for lunch?  Do I really want X updates/hour?  Do I really want to know everything about friend B, whom I see more as an acquaintance?  Facebook’s got some of this functionality; you can select which of your friends you’d like to see more ‘news feed stories’ about and which "friends" you’d like to see less stories about.  (Speaking of which, I’ve always thought Orkut‘s ability to distinguish friend from acquaintance [acquaintance, friend, good friend, best friend] was really useful; but no one else seems to have replicated that feature–I think people are too scared to rate friends: "*Gasp!*  I have 283 "friends" but I only consider 2 to be good friends?!).

On a side note, I’ve always found the Wall concept on Facebook really interesting.  Why do people feel the need to publicly disclose 1:1 conversations?  Do people have something to prove to others?  "Yeah I’m *really* her friend; see, I talk to her.."  It’s interesting, also, to note that while on Facebook you write your responses on *other’s* Walls, on Twitter you write your responses on your *own* profile page.

Facebook’s on a roll here, but still has much to do.  I (think) you still can’t push updates into it without explicitly logging into it.  I can understand why they do this; they need to deliver their ads–and it’s hard enough trying to make money from ads when your users are too busy leaving messages for each other to click on the ads.  I absolutely love Twitter’s XMPP integration that allows me to use GTalk to push *and* receive updates.  (I don’t use the SMS capabilities or Facebook Mobile because I don’t have a smartphone or a data plan–they’re so dang expensive.)

So those were some of my thoughts.  Nothing particularly new here (you can probably find many other posts about this subject from two weeks ago–late to the party, as usual), but I came to these conclusions myself.  🙂  Note that if Windows Live were able to integrate all these features: friend feeds on the personalized page, status/wall into Spaces, notifications/posts/updates via Messenger, etc., it would make a killer offering.  Not only would you have the website backend, but you’d have the client side software (which none of these sites currently have) integrated with it.  People would eat it up.

In the meantime I’ll probably be using Twitter sporadically, until other people stop using it (which will probably happen any day now).  As with any other social software, what’s the fun using it when no one else is?