When it comes to online privacy, teens have very different beliefs than adults. Maybe Facebook CEO Mark  Zuckerberg is right, “the way that people think about privacy is changing.” Despite story after story criticizing Facebook’s changing privacy controls, a recent survey of 15,000 social networking users showed the majority of teens (54%) didn’t even know Facebook was in the news regarding privacy.

And those who did know did not care. The same privacy settings and instant personalization that caused a giant uproar from seemingly everyone, did not strike the same cord with teens. Though most adults believe Facebook acted inappropriately by changing the default privacy settings, a whopping 70% of teens, who were informed of recent changes to the privacy controls, did not.

Though 71% of adults find Facebook privacy settings important or very important, only 56% of teens hold the same beliefs. Yet, these teens are tagged in more pictures, login more regularly, and have more friends than their adult counterparts.

It is not that teens don’t use their privacy settings — they do; over 72% of adults and teens alike admit to customizing their settings. Instead, teens trust Facebook more with what they share. Though only 32% of adults think their information is safe on Facebook, more than half of teens do.

As Kara Swisher notes in her question to Zuckerberg at D8, sharing can mean different things to different people, and it’s apparent that sharing to teens means something very different than what it means to adults. Maybe Zuckerberg is right. The mores of privacy are changing, and “people don’t want complete privacy.” Teens may be the first adopters of this change, or these teens may eventually look like their parents and begin to adopt more privacy controls as they grow up – only time will tell.

Methodology: 15,000 Users Polled who are social networking users of Facebook and myYearbook.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 8th, 2010 at 2:11 pm and is filed under Trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.