The online confessions, stripped bare photos, and frank opinions of Gen Y can make Baby Boomers cringe. One journalist wrote of a young bartender she had met in person, “I had liked Kitty: She was warm and funny and humble…But reading her [online journal], I feel thrown off. Some of it makes me wince. Much of it is witty and insightful. Mainly, I feel bizarrely protective of her…she seems so exposed.”

Although Gen Y may be more willing to post revealing information than their elders, some are also more controlling of it. “The Pew Internet Project has found that people in their 20s exert more control over their digital reputations than older adults, more vigorously deleting unwanted posts and limiting information about themselves”.  The Project also found that teenagers obscure their physical locations and personal data online. In the words of a 19 year old university student, “I have to look out for me.”  A University of California study showed that most 18-24 year olds are actually “in harmony with older Americans regarding concerns about online privacy, norms, and policy suggestions.”

Yet Gen Y’s “aspiration[s] for increased privacy” do not always match their participation “in an online reality that is optimized to increase their revelation of personal data”. They mix caution with carelessness and a desire to connect. Some Gen Y believe the sheer volume of personal information published online provides anonymity and they will only be identified by positive connections who want to collaborate or open career paths for them. This naivety can be dangerous. As I wrote in “Is online privacy an illusion?”, seemingly harmless information shared online can be used to deduce your movie rentals, political affiliation, and, (alarmingly) your social security number.

So why aren’t Gen Y acting on their privacy concerns? In short, they don’t understand the limits of privacy law. Gen Y are “more likely to believe that the law protects them both online and off. This lack of knowledge in a tempting environment, rather than a cavalier lack of concern regarding privacy” explains their behavior.

It may be time to start treating the entire web as one interconnected data collection form. Innocuous information you share online can be used to deduce your movie rental habits, political affiliation, and even your social security number.

Consider this:

•    Netflix inadvertently revealed the identities of some of their subscribers even though they removed personally identifying information from their publically available database. Two University of Texas researchers were able to match Netflix subscribers’ to their reviews of vulnerable movies on sites like IMDB.

•    Another discovery out of the University of Texas, this time involving an assistant professor and his student, was that peoples’ political affiliations can be inferred from social networks. Group membership, music preference, and friendship connections were particularly indicative of political affiliation. The dataset for this experiment was 167,000 online profiles and 3 million ‘friends’ in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

•    Even those who are unconcerned that others can see their movie rental records, or know their political persuasion, would be upset if their social security numbers were uncovered. Another duo of researchers, in this case from Carnegie Mellon University, were able to destabilize the Social Security numbers of 8.5% of US citizens born from 1989 to 2003 based on publically available data including social network profiles.

As Maneesha Mithal of the Federal Trade Commission’s privacy division stated in The New York Times, “Technology has rendered the conventional definition of personally identifiable information obsolete…You can find out who an individual is without it.”

So do we need to protect the next generation of Internet contributors, those born since 1995 referred to as Gen Z? In The New World of Wireless: How to Compete in the 4G Revolution Scott Snyder writes that Gen Z are the most likely generation to accept reduced privacy in order to participate in the “immersive, ‘user-centric’ wireless experiences” delivered by 4G mobiles. Encouragingly, this generation is demonstrating an ability to engage and minimize their public exposure. Regulatory body Ofcom’s media literacy audit found that a full quarter of 8-12 year old UK citizens have social networking profiles on Facebook, MySpace, or Bebo. A vast majority of this active quarter, 83%, have set their privacy settings to only allow their friends to see their profiles.

I think Gen Z will be just fine; we don’t need to instill a mistrust of academics that travel in twos or teach them about the interrelated nature of the Internet. Let’s concentrate on ourselves and realize that by placing our first name on one site and our last name on another site we’re effectively placing our full name in the same place.

When Google rolled out Buzz in mid-February, people were angered by the type of privacy breaches which have plagued another social medium. The three main issues for Buzz were:

• auto generation of follower lists from individuals’ private email and chat behavior
• auto completion of some email addresses in a feature similar to Twitter’s @reply
• auto connection to Google Reader and Picasa Web Albums.

Google responded to privacy concerns within days. However, for some who had very real privacy concerns, this simply wasn’t good enough.

I use my private Gmail account to email my boyfriend and my mother.

There’s a BIG drop-off between them and my other “most frequent” contacts.

You know who my third most frequent contact is?

My abusive ex-husband.

Which is why it’s SO EXCITING, Google, that you AUTOMATICALLY allowed all my most frequent contacts access to my Reader, including all the comments I’ve made on Reader items, usually shared with my boyfriend, who I had NO REASON to hide my current location or workplace from, and never did.

There’s still a lot to learn about how we integrate privacy into new products, but we know the golden rule – personal information should never be published without personal consent.

Update: US Congressmen have asked the Federal Trade Commission to examine complaints about Google Buzz.

We were so excited to watch our ‘link-ometer’ click over to 2 million that, with our noses pressed against our monitors, we took screen shots of the exact moment it happened.

What does it mean to have this many web pages mapped? You can now sort more of your search results by their relevance to your profile!

The number of links keeps doubling as we collectively visit an increasing variety of webpages. A half million links were mapped by April 2009, 1 million by June 2009, and now we’ve mapped 2 million!

Thank you for contributing to this grand experiment. As we create a virtual topography of the World Wide Web together, let us know if your profile has led you to web pages you wouldn’t have found otherwise or if anything isn’t working for you.

You can enrich your own experience by matching your DNA profile with people you know, or asking them to give feedback on your profile.

If you’ve logged in to Facebook since 9 December, you’ll have been introduced to the new Facebook privacy settings. As with Beacon, these new settings have outraged Facebook users and rights groups. Again, Facebook has relented, retracting the all (Google-wide) or nothing (not even your Facebook friends can see) visibility of friends lists.

The Facebook blog is a hotbed for complaints. As Peter ‘mos Undef’ Mann observed, since the new settings were rolled out, Facebook users have had to navigate six distinct versions of what aspects of our friends lists we can protect and how to set those restrictions.

Well Facebook, you fooled me once with Beacon, and now you’ve fooled me twice with your new privacy settings. Please don’t fool me again – make the profit you’re entitled to, just don’t invade my privacy or my friends’ privacy to do so.

From using the MyWebDNA extension, you know that you don’t have to sacrifice privacy for personalization. Unfortunately Facebook didn’t know this when they introduced Beacon.

Beacon, which shared sensitive data across users’ Facebook profiles, has been a disaster from the start, causing outrage over incidents like broadcasting the price paid for an engagement ring — before the ring had been presented. In response to the widespread backlash, (the “How dare you betray me?” response we’ve detailed in previous posts) Facebook has had to backpedal dramatically. First they switched from case-by-case opt-out to permanent opt-out, then to opt-in only, and finally they canceled the program altogether.

Facebook still doesn’t get it; they don’t have to invade your privacy to deliver ads which are meant for you. Until Facebook learns that they can give you what you want without tracking you, they are under-serving you.