Privacy aware

It is Privacy Awareness Week so a post on privacy is obligatory. But my thoughts go back a few weeks. The last school holidays to be precise.

Now, school holidays can be the best of times, the worst of times. A combination of too much time for kids and peer pressure tends to favour the worst of times outcome.

Perhaps unsurprisingly then, one night at the dinner table during the last school holidays, my daughter announced with a touch of pride that she had set up her Facebook profile that day. I suppose I should have reacted with parental joy at her accomplishment but I'm privacy aware.

Gently, I asked how a 12 year old could set up a Facebook account when, according to their terms, the minimum age is 13. Turns out that it's only a "commitment" that the user makes. I assume Facebook wouldn't know if a dog tried to sign up and probably wouldn't be too bothered either.

So I came up with what sounded like a win-win solution. She got to keep her account if her privacy-aware parent (me) "helped" her with the privacy settings.

After dinner we got to work. The first challenge was to find the privacy settings. I almost gave up but my daughter helpfully showed me where they were hidden. Half an hour later I was left confused and frustrated. The complexity and number of choices, in what seemed to be English, left me in no doubt that I had no clue about what settings we actually made. I suspect even the mythical rocket scientist would have done only marginally better. Facebook won. The social networking allure won. Peer pressure won. My daughter was on her way to become another privacy statistic. Now, being privacy aware is a good first step. For example, the ID Theft Tool does provide people with valuable tips. But it is only a first step.

Turns out that I'm not alone in my concerns. According to the latest UMR Privacy Survey, information that children put on the Internet about themselves is the privacy issue that most worries New Zealanders.  More than half of users believed that social networking sites were mainly private spaces where people shared information with their friends.

It used to be that most privacy concerns were directed at government. However, according to the Survey, people continue to have high trust in government agencies. Privacy concerns are gradually shifting. With increased usage, social networking sites are now emerging as a major concern.

My own experience makes me wonder about the 86% in the Survey who claimed they knew how to set their privacy controls.

Privacy awareness is a good thing. So is locking the doors of your car. We wouldn't accept not being able to find where the lock on our car was. We wouldn't accept it if only one of a hundred choices actually locked the car and the others only gave us an illusion that the car was locked.

But that's not all there is to it. Locking cars is a good first step but insufficient to prevent theft. The onus is on businesses and organisations who collect our personal information - and that of our children - to protect our privacy and prevent identity theft.