A new change in Facebook privacy settings now allow teens to publically share their Facebook posts. While teens will have the option to allow public access to their posts, Facebook will automatically have their default setting be set to share with friends only.
With public posting now as an option for young teens, Facebook will be sending out a reminder to these users, if they choose to make their posts public, and let them know that public means that posts can be seen by everyone, not just their friends, friends of friends or people they know.
While Facebook is now allowing public sharing for teens, the site is actually tightening up teens’ default setting by having sharing with friends as the default option rather than friends of friends. Before the recent change, “teens aged 13 to 17 joining the service defaulted to being able to share information—status updates, photos, videos, and the like—with anybody in their extended network including friends and ‘friends of friends,’” said Facebook.
Is allowing 13-17 year old teens to post public information on Facebook while making their default settings stricter counterintuitive? Is there a benefit in making the default Facebook privacy setting friends only even relevant when the setting can so easily be changed? Or has nothing really changed? With today’s anonymity of the Internet, what’s to stop these teens from lying about their age to avoid these privacy guidelines all together?
Learn more about the new Facebook privacy settings on the Facebook Newsroom: http://newsroom.fb.com/News/737/Teens-Now-Start-With-Friends-Privacy-for-New-Accounts-Adding-the-Option-to-Share-Publicly
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A bit scary and it connects to another blog from this week:
https://smusmc.com/2013/10/social-media-bullies/
Gotta teach’em kids tolerance consistently.
This is scary, I think that teenagers already have too much access to technology so I am not sure how this is going to play out. Interesting topic, good job!