Young people more engaged with Facebook privacy settings

In a new paper about the privacy attitudes of 18- and 19-year-olds, US researchers report that most Facebook users modified their privacy settings at least once last year, and that "engagement with privacy settings increased significantly" between 2009 and 2010. Overall, the findings, based on surveys of students at the University of Illinois at Chicago, show that "the majority of young adult users of Facebook are engaged with managing their privacy settings on the site at least to some extent." The researchers speculate the increased interest in privacy could come from public attention on the subject, from more changes in Facebook's default settings, or from prompts the social network shows users. The Chronicle of Higher Education (free access) | Read the report