GenZ and Privacy

Apple

Recently, the technology coordinator and I tried to teach a group of 25 seniors about privacy settings. These are our "Peer Leaders" who were learning this to pass the information along to their freshmen advisees. The school is concerned with predatory accounts friending, following and otherwise infiltrating our students' social networks for unethical, immoral reasons. Though these students are 18 years old, and supposedly "digital natives", it's safe to say they had NO idea how to control their privacy settings and NO idea how much of their data was being mined.

Perhaps Danah Boyd put it best when she wrote that today's media is "public by default, private when necessary." It's in these applications'/websites' best interest to keep profiles open to foster connections and thus mine more data in order to create future revenue. Therefor, it's imperative that we force our students think critically and carefully about which permissions they give to which applications and websites... and why.

Problem:
The peer leaders in this classroom laughed uncomfortably when they uncovered the sheer volume of apps to which they had given access to their location--not to mention the amount of apps to which they had given access to their photographs.

They admitted that they often accepted "friends" whom they had never met in person. Many of them have over 1,000 friends on Facebook, and had never gone back through to remove friends--not to mention remove old posts. And that's just one of their social networks where they've over-connected and over-shared. And, this all permanent, a fact that millennials often forget (including snapchat--just check their terms of service).

Solution:
To address this deficiency, we talked about how to revoke access to applications and websites that were mining their data. We even encouraged them to limit their friend lists and interactions on social networks. Then, we empowered them with a few tools to fight back--ways to track links and ways to pull a predator's IP address if they felt threatened.

Though I felt good about this lesson, I felt far more depressed about how oblivious students were to the inner-workings of social networks and applications.

Unfortunately, we often only teach these lessons after students have already made a mistake or struggled through an online interaction. And, in what capacity are schools going to teach these lessons? We had to hold our seniors out of a meeting period in order to find the time to teach this. I can't think of anything more important to teach the supposed "digital natives."

Fortunately for me, I teach a summer class called Mass Media where this is part of my curriculum. And, I see the same problems with those millennials. The way I've taught this in the past and will again in the future is by teaching data mining. Putting a face on which businesses are mining their data and how they're using this data often spooks them. I hope that my students will tighten up their privacy settings, think twice about posting something publicly, and reject application permissions and  "friend" requests. If this lesson really hits, the students will go back through all their old posts and permissions and start cleaning up their digital resumes. After all, we're only moving towards more online interactions and, paper resumes will be outdated by the time these teens apply for jobs.