Those growing up in the age of socio-techno systems such as Facebook are often more aware of data control than is believed, writes Karlin Lillington

HOW WILL a younger generation that lives life on the always-on internet deal with security and privacy – and do those terms even have any meaning to anyone under 20?

This is an issue that fascinates the well-known security and technology expert and author Bruce Schneier. Also the chief security officer at BT, Schneier was in Dublin recently to speak at the HEAnet annual conference and to the Institute of International and European Affairs.

Just as music once divided the generations, attitudes toward the internet are now creating a generation gap, he says. “I think it [the difference] is going to be defining,” says Schneier.

Part of the problem is that, as with rock music in the 1960s, much of an older generation just does not understand Facebook, Twitter, blogs, internet chat and all the other online forms of communication. “People say tweets are so banal – but it’s not meant for you. Remember, you are not the audience,” he says. Their friends are.

“And people say Facebook friends aren’t real friends, but that’s not the point. Facebook is part of everything. The whole myriad of human relationships is on Facebook. The problem with Facebook is that it collapses contexts.”

Schneier suggests the example of a teen who posts about the wild party he attended at the weekend and then suddenly remembers his mother can read what he just posted because she’s one of his friends on Facebook. “That’s a context collision,” he explains. Context collisions are what create much of the friction between generations in the perception of the online lifestyles that younger people increasingly lead. Situations arise where one audience is reading things posted for a different intended audience; the writer forgetting or perhaps just ignoring that anyone can look at the endless flow of information pouring into social network platforms.

Schneier says such collisions form the basis of many media stories about the online world – on college officers reading the Facebook or MySpace profiles of prospective students, or of people being fired for writing something about work in their personal blog. “But that’s the older generation’s social mores coming up against the younger generation,” he says.

He tends to agree with the notion that eventually, as one academic has put it, the people doing the hiring will have themselves at one point posted embarrassing pictures to Facebook, and no one will care anymore.

A curious element of the data flow to sites like Facebook is that many of the “facts” posted by younger people are deliberate untruths. Most kids “have been trained to lie” on social networks – many keep their real personal details out of their profiles as a deliberate privacy move.

Schneier calls this “data poisoning”. “Your hometown might be wrong, your birth year wrong – though but most people will put the right birthday because they want their friends to know when their birthday is – and you might post a picture identification that’s wrong. But that’s because everyone knows they’re wrong. Facebook is a place where real friends communicate, and your friends already know the correct details about you.”

So while he notes the notion of privacy is definitely going through a lot of change, he says it is ridiculous to say, as many do, that younger people don’t care about their privacy, based on the evidence of how they use social networks.

“People that say that don’t remember being a teen. Of course they care, but they are being forced to do things that an older generation never had to think about. It’s the first time in life you’ve had to have a privacy policy! We’re forced to make explicit what was implicit. We are moving away from an evolved social systems to deliberately engineered socio-techno systems. And that’s unnatural.”

As a basic example, he notes the previous evening he had gone to Apple’s iTunes store to buy something. In the process, he was asked to accept a new privacy policy. When he looked more closely, he noticed it was the first of over 50 pages of a legal document. “There is no human being on the planet who wants to read all of it – that ‘agree’ button says ‘go away and let me just do what I came here to do’.”

Did he click it without reading the 50-plus pages? “No. Of course not. I read the whole thing,” he laughs.

All of this adds up to less user control, however. Both technological and business trends are leaning this way, and he notes that international laws are also tending to stay hands off.

“Especially on the internet, libertarians are defining what’s allowed.” Still, there have to be rules set by somebody, he says, either the law or the market. Right now, they’re being set by the market, rather alarmingly, without people really noticing.

“In so many of these social economic technological structures, people make the mistake of thinking they – consumers – are the end market and they expect great customer service. But with social network sites, you are not their customer. The market is their customer; some other company that might find it useful to have access to your information.”

People need to understand that, and keep pushing to retain control of their own data – which is different from the argument that people should not use social networks or post about themselves in the first place.

“Privacy doesn’t equal secrecy. It isn’t about secrecy – it’s about control of our information.” Nonetheless, once information is out there, it is hard to retract. “This will be the first time in our society where we don’t forget things. Forgetting lubricates our social relations.”

He isn’t willing to speculate about how society will adjust to this change.

Perhaps, though, society will just absorb this transformation and eventually we won’t keep replaying an indiscretion or embarrassment from our past. “Maybe it will happen, and then it won’t matter anymore,” he says.

And what about the younger generation coming up, the so-called “net natives” who will never have known a world without the very public sitting room of the internet? Will the kids be alright?

“I think the kids will be alright. There’s two things you have to remember about the generation gap,” he says, saying the same pattern happens over and over.

“The older generation is correct about all the problems. And the younger generation will be alright.”