The concept of privacy in the digital world according to teenagers

This study aims first to explore how adolescents define the idea of online privacy and how well they understand all the implications of using their data online, using emergent themes modeling. A co-occurrence analysis comparing narratives was performed to better understand how the concept of online privacy differed according to participants’ age.

Five hundred eighty-eight adolescents (64.8% female) completed a narrative task about their definition of online privacy. “Reflection of self-online,” “digital safe,” “human right,” and “ability to surf the web and emotional consequences” are the four emergent themes closely related to the adolescents’ definition and meaning of online privacy.

The results did not show differences between the two age groups in the interpretation of the construct, except for the concept of safety. Adolescents older than 15 years used more emotional content.

The findings are discussed in terms of how understanding young people’s online privacy can help to design a safer Internet.