TikTok and Ya Don’t Stop
Late in 2023, the CEO of TikTok testified before Congress, denying the company shares data with the Chinese Communist Party. The TikTok case is interesting on many levels, so I asked my Westmont College students what they thought. Most of them had the TikTok app; few planned to give it up. When I asked if they were concerned about privacy and security, they gave a collective “meh.”
Westmont students are not alone. A CBS News/YouGov poll showed while 61% of Americans favor the U.S. government banning TikTok, only 39% of young people felt the same.
Most Americans, regardless of age, are concerned with digital privacy. However, Millennials are far less troubled by the loss of it than any other age group. A 2019 Pew Study found that Americans between 18 and 29 were more likely to say the benefits of governmental and corporate data collection outweigh the risks.
This privacy age gap seems to be a relatively new phenomenon. A Kaiser Family Poll in 1999 showed 86% of Americans thought the loss of privacy was a problem, with no statistically significant differences between age groups.
I asked my students why. Here are a few reasons they gave:
1. Gen Z and Gen Alpha grew up with social media. Young people know no other world. My students took it for granted that the government and companies collected their data. Older generations remember a different world, and the idea that the government or corporations would read our mail or tap our phones (the social media of our day) smacks us as particularly Orwellian.
2. FOMO. For young people, deleting social media risks becoming a social outcast. For them, giving up a little privacy is a small price for social relevancy.
3. Concerns about xenophobia. Some of my students expressed concerns that the heated rhetoric toward TikTok would increase hate crimes against Asian Americans. Young people are generally more concerned about racial equity than other age groups. Therefore, young people might be more sensitive to how the bipartisan attack on a Chinese company might adversely affect the Asian American community.
4. Personalization. My students were also willing to give up privacy for greater personalization. They liked social media giving them curated rabbit holes. And they liked the convenience of online companies knowing that, say, they’re in the market for a new mountain bike. Again, my students are not outliers. The 2019 Pew study found that nearly half of 18-29-year-olds were willing to give more personal information to their smart speaker if it gave them better recommendations.
What does the privacy age gap mean for the future? It is easy to forget that the Big Data/AI era is still in its infancy. The potential for governments and companies to learn more about our personal lives increases as technology becomes more sophisticated and we spend more time online. The future will look quite different if each new generation grows increasingly unconcerned about digital privacy. If so, old-timers like me will start going the way of Ron Swanson
