What Every Teen Needs To Know About Internet Safety

Teenagers reportedly spend an average of seven hours each day online, not including schoolwork; 29% of teenagers spend more than eight hours online. Three of those hours, on average among people aged 16 to 24, are dedicated to social media, according to a 2019 study.

What entails healthy internet usage is certainly debatable. It’s undeniable, however, that given the scale of this usage — Statista reported that by the end of 2018, there were about 22 billion internet-connected devices worldwide and predicted this number would rise to 39 billion by 2025 and 50 billion by 2030 — it is vital to know how your personal information is being absorbed and used by others.

There are two categories of personal information online. There is information you intentionally post for the public to view, and there is also data collected by the websites you visit, apps you use, and other activity you do online, which both legitimate and unauthorized (possibly malicious) actors can potentially access.

Our voluntarily shared information isn’t always as secure as we’d like to believe it is. Many people create alternative, secret accounts to share certain aspects of their personal lives with a select audience of followers they don’t want to make public. But there can be cross-contamination in these networks (i.e., a friend may follow both your work and your personal profile) that can easily nullify that desired separation, and there can be consequences for people who post things they may later regret online.

For example, a troll or stalker seeking to collect information on a target may seek these breadcrumbs of information by searching a target’s networks of friends and followers for additional information to learn more about them. Colleges are also increasingly reviewing potential students’ social media accounts, and some admissions teams have rescinded acceptances due to inappropriate content. This happens in the workplace, too: A 2017 CareerBuilder survey found that 70% of employers screen applicants through their social media and 54% of employers disqualified potential workers due to some content visible on these accounts. Artificial intelligence will make such searches increasingly automated for admissions and hiring teams as well.

What’s more, with the rapid advancement of deepfakes (digitally altered images, videos, or other media that appears to be authentic), people may become online victims for things they haven’t even done. In March of this year, a Pennsylvania mother was arrested for posting deepfake images and videos of her daughter’s cheerleading rivals, trying to damage their reputations by distributing fake, lewd material that included the victims’ faces (taken from their social media) and edited onto other people’s bodies.

At the very least, it is important to turn on the privacy settings on personal accounts to make it harder for anyone with an internet connection to access your information. However, the internet is ultimately a public space, and once information passes through external servers, you lose command of it. Images you posted can become the property of a website once they post it, even if the user deletes the upload seconds later. If the person posting is notable or popular in their real-world or online communities, their content may also be promptly copied and stored by others, and then that content is truly out of their control.

Furthermore, a person’s digital footprint is also extensively documented and can be traced back to them. Every device has a specific IP (Internet Protocol) address, and every choice and action on that device can be traced back to its unique IP. While this footprint is beneficial for law enforcement agents attempting to track down suspects in cybercrime, it can also be used by threatening actors, like hackers, to view or steal a device’s extensively recorded information database.

We must remember that all things contributed to the internet are lasting and vulnerable. The only way to stay completely safe online is by not being online. However, the best way to mitigate risk is by taking your digital presence seriously and thinking carefully before you release a post, navigate a website, make a purchase, or share a meme.