Abandoning Facebook: Understanding Teens’ Perception and Engagement of Online Privacy on Social Platforms

Teens are one of the most prominent users of social media platforms. However, they seem to abandon Facebook, which is still the most popular social network. These teens are moving to other social platforms, such as Whatsapp, Instagram and Snapchat. Therefore Facebook acquired both Whatsapp and Instagram and tried to buy Snapchat. This study examines if Dutch teens are actually abandoning Facebook and which elements play a crucial role in this process. Parents friending teens on Facebook seem to be important factors in this process, since teens could see this as an intrusion of their privacy. On the contrary, parents are often worried about third parties having access to their children’s’ data. Teens’ perception and engagement related to privacy is therefore key in this study. In this paper it was found that teens primarily care about social privacy and not so much about informational privacy, which related to third party access. For younger teens, parents are a big influence in their social privacy and for older teens, friends are important elements in that specific privacy. They have created many privacy protection strategies, but those are useless for third party access, which makes it just an illusion of control. In this research a survey was conducted to partially replicate studies by Miller (2013) and Madden et al. (2013) and focus groups helped two give deeper insights on the given topics, presented by the survey. Finally a minor qualitative content analysis helped to get a notion of the participants’ actual online behavior and privacy management.