Privacy in social networks is an area of active research. Teenagers are an important group of users since they spend a substantial amount of time using such sites. This paper examines the behavior of teenagers aged 12 to 17 and the role of their parents in helping protect their privacy.

The data source used for the analysis was drawn from the recent Teens and Privacy Management Survey conducted by Princeton Research Associates International. The telephone survey was conducted using landline and cell phones. The total sample consisted of 802 parents and their 802 teens aged 12 to 17. The parents (64 percent female) were interviewed first, and then a subsequent interview with a teenager living with the parent was conducted. The teens were filtered out if they were not using a networking site like Facebook. As a result of filtering, 622 teen respondents remained.

The authors found that a majority of teens had deleted people from their network of friends list, some had deleted comments others had made on their profiles, and some had also blocked people. It is concluded that voluntary disclosure of personal information by teenagers on sites like Facebook is difficult to curb.

The authors investigated the influences of parental mediation and social network usage and found that parents were more concerned about their children’s online data. This concern appears to have a strong relationship with the children’s privacy concerns. The authors also found that there was a relationship between social network usage and the development of user understanding of consumer aspects of the social networks.

The results of the study are interesting, although not very surprising. It should be of interest to people studying the behavior of the younger users of social networks.