News flash – Younger adults *do* care about privacy

I co-authored a report released today (April 15, 2010) based on our July 2009 survey data that examined a number of our survey questions by age. We were curious—would we find any generational differences in privacy attitudes, practices, and knowledge of relevant laws? The answer: in terms of attitudes, very few; the young (18-24), like their elders (25+), overall expressed support for informational privacy (and in some cases in very high numbers, e.g. over 80%). In terms of practices, we found a mix of results, with younger adults doing things such as checking their credit reports far less often than older folks (which makes sense, considering that their credit histories are short and they likely have fewer credit cards), and like their elders, not reading privacy policies much. Importantly, we found that in terms of knowledge of relevant laws, the young performed exceptionally poorly—in sum, younger adults appear to believe, mistakenly, that they have far more protections than the law actually affords, which could help explain why we often observe such riskier, seemingly anti-private behavior by them. The Associated Press covered the report, as did the San Francisco Chronicle. The report is available on SSRN.