I hear from people all the time that Millennials are soooo open about their lives. After all, we blog, we tweet and we update our Facebook statuses allowing all of our friends to read all sorts of things about our personal lives. So I was a little surprised when I saw this article by Heather West in Wireds Geek Dad Blog about online privacy being a generational issue. The study she highlighted, performed by the Pew Internet and American Life project, said that 60 percent of adults and 66 percent of teens restrict access to their social network profile information. That means that the majority of people on social networks are in some way or another protecting what everyone can see.
Millennials cross the adult/teen border line in this study, but the overall point is one that I expected: Millennials are more private that you think.
While this may be surprising to some people, I thought of a few reasons why it totally makes sense:
1. Millennials are afraid of their future employers- We know that employers Google us before they hire us, which is probably the number one reason we feel the need to be private. We are afraid of them seeing our drinking pictures and what our friend wrote on our wall, and a lot of us really really need a job.
2. Millennials care about what people think- Millennials care about what their coworkers, teachers, friends and everyone in the entire world think about them. Which is why it’s easier for Millennials to alter their privacy settings and not allow their 5th grade teacher to see their college photos, instead of having to worry if that person is quietly judging them.
3. Millennials still want some boundaries- We know that the lines between professional and personal are totally blurred, but we still want to set up some boundaries and control what other people can see. We want to be open, but we are still very cautious.
Do you see what I’m saying? Millennials are much more private people than you think. But can you really blame us?
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I don’t buy it when people say that Millennials don’t care for privacy. This one definitely does. To me, it is more accurate to say that older people don’t care for the privacy of Millennials and then try to project their attitude on us. I believe that those who say that Millennials don’t care for privacy have a vested interested in destroying privacy. Government officials (particularly the military), marketers, and corporations all have an interest in destroying privacy because they want to snoop on our lives and to control it.