Facebook’s new danger

When Facebook recently lifted its restriction on public posts by teenagers, some privacy scholars applauded the move as a win for parents-offering them a chance to teach their children about digital accountability. They may be overstating the case, however. If information and communication technologies aren’t designed to help users-especially younger ones-guard their information, appeals to good judgment and discipline won’t go very far.

Before the most recent change, the social media site did a decent job of protecting privacy through obscurity, especially for teenagers. Under its former policy, younger users could communicate only within their extended network. Their biggest privacy concern was whether one of their “friends” or a “friend of friend” would release their information to an unintended audience.

Now that Facebook has changed its policy, teens have access to a broader, more public audience. Even if today’s children are more Internet-savvy than their parents, they still need to be taught to avoid oversharing, and parents are placed in the unenviable position of guiding teens without seeming too controlling.

Thankfully, the default setting for teen accounts on Facebook still restricts information to make it sharable only with friends. However, the new policy also allows teenage users to change the setting, warning those who do about basic problems that can arise from posting publicly. This is a helpful nudge-in principle. But convincing teenagers to act in their best interest is often a losing battle.

Perhaps the most important reason Facebook shouldn’t have introduced this change is that teens need opportunities to fail safely. They must be allowed to experiment-to make mistakes and to learn from them. As parents, our job is to encourage them to explore ideas, experiences and even personas.

Facebook now presents parents, teachers and teens with a heightened challenge of taming a technological tool that often encourages recklessness. While social media can be personally empowering, it also gives others increasing control over our lives-including powerful companies and advertisers who often seem a step ahead of our ability to defend against them. Growing up online is complicated enough without the medium working against you.

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Evan Selinger is an associate professor of philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology and a fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technology. Woodrow Hartzog is an assistant professor at Samford University’s Cumberland School of Law and affiliate scholar at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School.