My journey through the web of internet privacy

The web pun was intended.

My journey through my own internet privacy has been an interesting one, and I expect the opposite of many people. I'm at just the right age to have been around for essentially the birth of what we currently call the internet (not the US military type internet, like the "world wide web"). I've made the Bane joke with some of my students about how far back I've been online. They merely adopted the internet, I was born in it.

I'm going to go a bit against my current privacy philosophy, and provide some back story for context on my "internet connected life" thus far. As I've mentioned before, we were a very techy household growing up. We had internet well before it was convenient for most people (and the long distance charges at the time to prove it). I grew up being on a first name basis at 3 years old with the owner of the Apple store on Bentick Street in Sydney (Bill Faulkner, we even went to his house a few times). We were a house of super nerds, and adopters of everything.

It shouldn't be a surprise that as I got older I was on every chat/IM platform going (AIM, every variation of MSN Messenger from pre-1.0 beta onward etc.) and I had no privacy concerns as a kid. I filled out EVERYTHING. If I had a place to publish something, I probably did. Name, age, favorite color, even my phone number (you couldn't call us anyway, dialup and all). I expect even my physical address was all over the place, in retrospect I guess I'm lucky I wasn't abducted.

As I aged I quickly realized, probably before many of peers, that I didn't want to share everything about myself on things like MySpace and eventually facebook. I was taking things down, going by aliases, and faking any info in required fields to access things.

What I find interesting about adolescents in 2022 is that there seems to be a distinction between what they consider "private information" and overall privacy and safety. Research by Martin et al. (2018) illustrates this point when they describe student perceptions of social media. One of the reasons students gravitate toward platforms like Snapchat, is because it's a platform that a) gives content a short lifespan and b) is a platform most adults have not adopted in the same way they have with sites like Facebook. This demonstrates a level of desire to be keep information private, yet students in the same study also demonstrated a willingness to add strangers where 40% of participants indicated they would add someone who sent them a request even if they didn't know them. They won't publish everything everywhere like I did, but it's more to keep their parents and adults in their life out, not to "stay safe." This idea was also something found in the Adorjan and Ricciardelli (2018) book that describes not necessarily a desire to limit what they're sharing to peers, but limit what is visible to parents and other adults where they describe"how perceived audiences drives differing approaches to posting content (p. 7).

Adorjan, M., & Ricciardelli, R. (2018). Cyber-Risk and Youth: Digital Citizenship, Privacy, and Surveillance (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315158686

Martin, F., Wang, C., Petty, T., Wang, W., & Wilkins, P. (2018). Middle School Students’ Social Media Use.Educational Technology & Society, 21(1).