Facebook Changes Privacy Settings for Teens: Now Posts Can Be Public

Facebook is changing how public teenagers' postings can be, lifting the 17 and under restriction on public posts.

However, Facebook says, privacy settings can still restrict postings to audiences as private as "friends only". In fact, that will be the default setting for teens on the giant social network.

The logic, according to TechCrunch, is "that other sites don't restrict kids, teens are getting more web savvy, and young celebrities want a voice."

In Facebook's blog post announcing the changes, Facebook notes that the default audience for teenagers aged 13 through 17 was initially set to "Friends of Friends," a wider audience than the default is now.

And Facebook says it takes the safety of teens very seriously, so posts will include an inline reminder telling young Facebookers that the comment, status, or other content that they're about to post will be viewable by anybody, and give them an option to change the post's privacy setting.

If they choose to continue making the post publically, they will get an additional reminder to confirm their privacy setting before the post goes through.

"Teens are among the savviest people using social media, and whether it comes to civic engagement, activism, or their thoughts on a new movie, they want to be heard," said Facebook's blog post, giving a screen capture of a few of the blog posts it expects teens - and parents - would feel comfortable being viewable by the world.

And Facebook has a point. In a recent study by the he Pew Internet and American Life Project called "Teens, Social Media, and Privacy," teens were found to be quite conscious of their privacy settings and what they were putting out onto the web.

A large majority of them actively manage their presence online, according to the study:

59 percent have deleted or edited something that they posted in the past
53 percent have deleted comments from others on their profile or account
45 percent have removed their name from photos that have been tagged to identify them
31 percent have deleted or deactivated an entire profile or account

And, perhaps more reassuringly, a full 60 percent of teens in the study kept their Facebook profiles private, reporting high levels of confidence in their ability to manage their privacy settings.

As competitors, like Tumblr and Twitter (which has grown in popularity with teens, according to the same study) continue to grow, Facebook undoubtedly feels pressured by how those sites manage younger users.

Basically, they don't.

And a majority of teens on Twitter say that their tweets are public, with only 24 percent making them private.

Though a full 94 percent of teens who use social networks have Facebook accounts, focus groups from the same Pew study show that teens are growing less enthusiastic for Facebook. Part of that is the growing numbers of adults, and parents, on the site, and it's not clear that Facebook's changes will do anything to address that.

One remaining problem with social media and young users that is not addressed by Facebook's changes is how data derived from young Facebook accounts are used. Eighty-one percent of parents report being either "somewhat" or "very" concerned about how much information advertisers can learn about their children through social media.

According to the Washington Post, privacy groups have recently sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission asking the government to evaluate Facebook's policies on how it collects information on children, and how (or whether) advertisers are allowed to use that information. They want separate data collection policies for teens and adults, because, in that respect, Facebook has always treated teens as adults.