14 DAY TRIAL // According to a report from the Information Commissioner's Office, as many as 4.5 million young people would rather colleges, universities or potential employers didn't conduct an internet search on them unless they could first remove content from social networking sites.
After all, who would welcome the opportunity for his possible employer to see him with two M'n'Ms sticking out of his nostrils or with pencils in his ears? I wouldn't know anything about those two pictures described, I just chose them at random (rolls eyes).
David Smith, Deputy Commissioner for the ICO said that "Many young people are posting content online without thinking about the electronic footprint they leave behind. The cost to a person's future can be very high if something undesirable is found by the increasing number of education institutions and employers using the internet as a tool to vet potential students or employees. As well as not thinking ahead before posting information on the web about their drinking antics from the night before, the survey of Britons aged 14-21 also revealed that youngsters' online behavior is a gift to potential fraudsters."
Furthermore, the ICO reports that more than seven out of ten teenagers are not concerned that strangers can view their profile and 7% don't even care about the simplest privacy settings they could adjust to fit their needs and two thirds accept people they've never met or talked to before as "friends" on social networking sites, while half of them leave parts of their profile public with the sole purpose of attracting new people.
Another interesting fact discovered by the research is that this is indeed the "next-next-I agree-next-next" generation when it comes to installing software, as a third of the overall number of teens questioned admitted to never having read a privacy policy for a social networking sites or a license agreement.
That kind of conclusions bother me, but I don't really know why... it was so clear this would be coming our way.