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As part of a Youth Advisory Board of teens (YAB), a longitudinal and interactive program to engage with teens for adolescent online safety research, we used an Asynchronous Remote Community (ARC) method with seven teens to explore their social media usage and perspectives on privacy on social media. There was a spectrum of privacy levels in our teen participants’ preferred social media platforms and preferences varied depending on their user goals such as content viewing and socializing. They recognized privacy risks they could encounter on social media, hence, actively used privacy features afforded by platforms to stay safe while meeting their goals. In addition, our teen participants designed solutions that can aid users to exercise more granular control over determining what information on their accounts is to be shared with which groups of users. Our findings highlight the need to ensure researchers and social media developers work with teens to provide teen-centric solutions for safer experiences on social media. 

Future online safety technologies should consider the privacy needs of adolescents (ages 13-17) and support their ability to self-regulate their online behaviors and navigate online risks. To do this, adolescent online safety researchers and practitioners must shift towards solutions that are more teen-centric by designing privacy-preserving online safety solutions for teens. In this paper, we discuss privacy challenges we have encountered in conducting adolescent online safety research. We discuss privacy concerns of teens in regard to sharing their private social media data with researchers and potentially taking part in a user study where they share some of this information with their parents. Our research emphasizes a need for more privacy-preserving interventions for teens. 

We conducted an exploratory interview study with 10 undergraduate college students (ages 18-21) to get their feedback on how to best design a research study that asks teens (ages 13-17) to share portions of their Instagram data with their parents and discuss their online risk experiences. These young adults felt that teens should have as much control as possible when sharing their data, including the way that it was used in discussions with their parents. Our findings highlight the need to ensure researchers preserve the privacy and confidentiality of teens’ social media data.