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Yesterday Twitter (and the web in general) was abuzz with news and reports related to technology, and in particular young people and technology. Was all the news worth paying attention to? Was all the news care-worthy? Here are some thoughts:

Care: Reputation Management and Social Media
The Pew Internet in American Life Project released a report about reputation management and social media. The focus of the report is on how people, of all ages, manage what others know about them through social network environments.

A key finding in the Pew study is that young adults – defined in this instance as 18 to 29 – are very likely to change their privacy settings within social media environments. This age group, more than older users of social media, do know the impact that the information they make available online has on their reputation. While this doesn’t mean that we as librarians and educators don’t need to educate young people about privacy implications of what they post online, it does suggest that conversations with teens about online privacy need to be framed not around “you need to be private” with an assumption that young people don’t know that already, but instead focus on, “here’s how to be private” with an understanding that making decisions about and knowing how to use privacy settings in social networks affectively might be difficult.

The implications section of the Pew report includes this text:

“Young adults, perhaps out of necessity, are much more active curators of their online identities when compared with older adults. When they change privacy settings, delete tags and comments, and request that information about them be removed, they are demonstrating a desire to exert control over the content they share and the tide of information that others post about them online. However, certain privacy controls on social media sites have become increasingly difficult to navigate. These changes, instituted after the data for this report was gathered, raise questions about the efficacy of users’ current efforts to restrict access to the information posted to their profiles.”

And that leads me to

Care: Facebook Updates Privacy Settings – Again
For the past several weeks, Facebook has been in the news as the result of new services added to the social network. The new services are supposed to give users a better experience, however the launch of these services once again complicated the privacy settings on Facebook, they were pretty complicated already, and caused many to question what Facebook was up to.

Because of the dissatisfaction of users with the privacy implications of the most recent Facebook update, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of the company, announced yesterday that the privacy settings on the site would be simplified.