Baby boomers guilty of oversharing on Facebook

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January 26th, 2010 - Posted by Kent

A new study from Experian concludes that adults over the age of 45 share too much information online. The credit score reporting company completed a study of  1,052 men and women, analyzing their behavior on social networks. The study found that "14 percent of adults – and 20 percent of those age 60 and over – listed their full home addresses in their social media profiles."

The risks are the same that we've reported on before: posting vacation plans can lead to a burglary and a favorite pet's name can inadvertently disclose a the answer to a security question. None of this is new, but what's interesting is how this study focused on the habits of baby boomers. Experian did not provide any data on how it compares to the habits of younger users, so it's hard to say if this is particularly significant.

Age aside, it does point out problems with the confusing privacy settings on social networking sites. You don't have to be over the age of forty to be confused by Facebook's privacy settings. Founder Mark Zuckerberg was caught unaware by Facebook's confusing new privacy settings, which allowed his previously private photos to be viewed by any interested Facebook user. The photos have since been made private.

I use Facebook probably far more frequently than I should and I've gone through the various Facebook privacy changes myself, and not without a bit of confusion. It seems to me that Facebook could really help all its users understand the privacy settings by creating a simple interface that would allow them to view their own profiles from different relationship levels. Facebook users would understand the rules far better if they could directly see how another user would experience their profile.

Zuckerberg recently commented on Facebook's new privacy settings, saying that: "People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people." While I agree with Zuckerberg in spirit, I think it's problematic to allow user comfort to drive privacy policy. As the Experian study shows, people become comfortable with a lot of behaviors that can leave them exposed.

All social networks need to do a better job of helping users understand how public their data is. Building those rules into intuitive, experiential tools could go a long way to doing that.