Online privacy is a generational thing
By Wayde Bull, Planning Director at Principals.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt speaks with breathtaking candour on the topic of online privacy. He recently said, in a totally matter-of-fact way: “We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We more or less know what you’re thinking about”. In an even more Orwellian moment he quipped “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place”. In light of Google’s recent scrapes with the Australian Privacy Commissioner, we all have reason to reflect carefully upon Schmidt’s warnings.
So just how seriously are Australians taking the issue of online privacy and how carefully are we rationing the information that we share with others online? These questions have been tackled in Principals’ latest Digital Pulse study, a quarterly review of online attitudes and behaviours, based upon a nationally representative sample of internet users. This quarter the study explores the extent to which Australians feel comfortable sharing different kinds of information over the internet, from their personal interests and opinions, to photographs, name and address details, telephone and credit card numbers.
Six in ten Australians polled feel comfortable sharing their personal interests and attributed opinions with others online. It will surprise no one to learn that eight in ten young web users, less than 25 years of age, feel comfortable to share such personal opinions freely. While youth lead the way, a clear majority of Australians, regardless of age or gender, now embrace the idea that sharing their ideas and experiences online helps companies to deliver better products and services, more in tune with their needs.
But when it comes to sharing seriously personal data, Australians are considerably more circumspect. Just 48% feel comfortable sharing their name and address details, 38% their credit card or telephone numbers and just 13% their passport or drivers licence numbers online. Australians are astutely distinguishing between low risk ‘public me’ data and high risk ‘private me’ data shared online. And this distinction is most clearly recognised by the young.
The stereotype of the young online user is of someone recklessly sharing personal information, oblivious to the risks. Yet the reality is their online behaviour is highly evolved. On the one hand they do relentlessly share their personal opinions, lifestyle activities and photos with peers online, yet on the other hand they are wary about sharing data that allows their identification out in the real world. The very real risks of identity theft, cyber bullying and stalking are clearly well understood by online youth, given their cautious sharing of unique personal identifiers and their surprisingly active use of privacy settings on social sites.
The online journal First Monday recently published research amongst first-year university students in the US, noting just how engaged they have become with their privacy settings on Facebook. Between 2009 and 2010 the percentage of students who changed their privacy settings four or more times doubled from 24% to 51%. And just 2% of students had never reviewed their privacy settings at all.
It’s the sharing of photos online that most divides the generations. While nearly two thirds of young web users feel comfortable to post photos online, just one third of 55 pluses are at all comfortable with the idea. The middle generation, 26-55 are at present perfectly divided on the topic, so represent an enticing new tipping point target for the likes of Flickr and Facebook.
For boomers, photos look likely to forever remain in the province of ‘private me’. Yet for young Australians, online photos epitomise the whole idea of living online, despite the reputational risks. As Schmidt, the king of the internet cache reminds social networkers “when you post something, the computers remember forever”. Just as young people have learned to become selective about their sharing of unique data identifiers, they may grow to recognise there’s too high a price to pay for liberally posting personal photos and videos. That these too represent a unique personal identifier online.
An interesting counter-trend in the study is the relatively high levels of comfort that older Australians have with sharing personal identifiers like name and address details, phone numbers and credit card details online. This may in part be driven by the lesser risks of cyberstalking to this generation, but also flags their belief that the internet is primarily a transactional tool. It’s amongst older Australians 45 plus that the e-commerce opportunity is most pronounced. It’s time for brands to take the silver surfers’ wallets a good deal more seriously.
First published on AFR (www.afr.com) - 2nd December 2010
