Young Adults Are More Privacy-Conscious Online Than Ever [STUDY]

The Pew Internet & America Life Project is out with a new report finding that online users are taking a more active interest in reputation management.

Findings suggest that users increasingly change privacy settings, delete comments and untag themselves in photos, but overall the online population worries 7% less about how much information is available about them than it did in 2006.

2,253 American adults over the age of 18 were surveyed on their internet behaviors between August and September of last year, with Pew finding that 57% of adults have used search engines to find information about themselves online (up 10% from 2006), and 71% of social networking users 18 – 29 have changed their profile privacy settings.

According to Pew, the young adult demographic is the most privacy-conscious: 44% of 18 – 29 year-olds have made efforts to limit the personal information they share online, 47% of the same group have deleted comments on their profile and 41% have removed their name from photos they were tagged in. Plus, 28% of these same young adults say that they can “never” trust social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace (MySpace) and LinkedIn (LinkedIn).

By comparison, when looking at older demographics, the percentages for these same activities are much lower. Only 55% of social networking adults 50 – 64 have changed their default privacy settings, and only 20% of seniors 65 and older have actively limited the personal information they post online.

Pew attributes the rise in young adult reputation management to the increase in workplace policies surrounding social media sites. These findings are somewhat contradictory with a Consumer Reports study suggesting that many users don’t care about their Facebook (Facebook) privacy settings.

What does seem certain, though, is that young adults are becoming more aware about the information they post online, and the implications that content may have on their personal and professional lives.