This week’s reading Danah Boyd’s ‘Privacy: why do youth share so publicly?’ talked about the relationship with teenagers and their parents and whether parents have an innate ‘right’ to see what their children post- simply because it’s ‘accessible to everyone else, so it should be to me as well’.
This really hit home for me, coming from a household where my mother maintained that she have access to my Facebook by knowing my password up until the age of 16 (when I cracked it and said enough was enough). I was constantly told growing up, that everything I post online is there forever and that if I don’t think a certain someone will see it, that they will. This idea, which by no means am I rejecting or arguing against, was reinforced by not only my parents but by school teachers, spontaneous school seminars, relatives and even by my own peers. What annoyed me as I got older, and even to this day, was the fact that everyone thought ‘I’ needed to be told this time and time again.
As someone who is acutely aware of the consequences of online privacy after a video of a year 7 ‘spin the bottle’ challenge went awry after it was filmed without anyone’s knowledge and posted to Facebook without anyone’s consent (which then resulted in weeks of bullying); it frustrates me that the generation before me feels compelled to continuously educate me on the matter to this day. On the other hand, I can understand the need as even today I see 15/16-year-old girls on my Instagram posting staged photos of themselves topless and in their underwear-something that while may not be inherently wrong depending on your #freethenip stance, is something that may come back to haunt them for doing so at such a young and fragile age.
As I’m writing this, I feel slightly conflicted on whether we should constantly hammer internet privacy to teenagers, only because I have come to realise what teenagers today are actually posting through the likes of Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.