Given how much teens today document their lives online you have to wonder how much privacy you really have online. It is becoming increasingly more difficult for teens to keep their online lives private. This is partly due to the fact that the default on social media accounts is set to make everything public. If a social media user wants to make their social media account private, they must go out of their way to make their account private. Danah Boyd, author of the book "It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens," writes that many teens feel as though they’re in a no-win situation when it comes to sharing information online: damned if they publish their personal thoughts to public spaces, and damned if they create private space that parents can’t see. writes
For someone to make their profile on social media private it takes a lot of time and effort. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook is always making new changes and updates to the privacy policy on Facebook. This makes it confusing for users of Facebook to know what they are sharing publicly and what they are sharing to only their friends or certain people. At one time everything was private and people chose what they wanted to make public. Now everything is public and people have to choose what they want to make private.
Teens feel the need to post a lot on social media because they have a lot of pressure from society. Almost all teens nowadays are online. Some say that if you do not exist online you do not exist in real life. People even joke that if you do not Instagram something it did not even happen. Social media at one point was a fun way to shares certain events that you thought were interesting, but now it has taken over the lives of many teenagers. Before social media even existed people went on vacation to enjoy themselves and escape the world around them. Now one has to question the fact if teens even enjoy their vacations because they spend the entire time on their phones and post everything that happens to them on social media. It can be exhausting for everyone to always know where you are at all times and to know what you are doing.
I agree with the notion that teens are finding it more challenging to keep their online lives private. As a teen myself I face many challenges trying to navigate the online world. Everyone deserves privacy, whether it be online or in real life. Someone would not open up through home for just anyone to come into, so why should that be the case online? Online privacy was once a taken for granted luxury and now many want this privilege back.
