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Thursday Thoughts: Should privacy controls be additive or subtractive?

A recent report by The Washington Post looked at the ways parents use - or, often, don’t use - privacy settings on social media, which got us thinking. It’s well and good providing these tools, but if they aren’t being used effectively, members are potentially still exposed to a variety of unwanted content. How should this be addressed?

Should these kinds of privacy tools be subtractive and set to the highest settings as default, allowing members to opt in to seeing the content? Or would additive controls be better, under which all content is allowed, and the option to add further restrictions is available in the member profile settings? Or perhaps there are entirely different ways to approach this?

Let us know in the comments!

Created at 5:29pm, 8th February, 2024. Page last updated at 2:43pm, 16th May, 2024.

Dave 2/8/2024, 6:23:47 PM

For me, the default should be family friendly safe in content and language and if you have an account, the option to enable additional content.

EveOnlineTutorials 2/8/2024, 6:32:50 PM

As a senior It engineer, one of my biggest jobs at this point and in this day and age is activating safety controls for young children for the parents, it is staggering and boggles the mind how many parents do not have a clue how to monitor their kids online or even how to use technology.

I have to constantly add/remove controls on phones/iPads/PCs/consoles for parents. These controls and settings should be default on any new device/account made or created online and any new laptops/PCs/iPads/phones etc should come with full parental controls already established.

Another part of my job is removing "unwanted" photos that have been leaked online, no I'm not going to go into detail, you know what I mean and the amount of times I have had to do this is just wrong. If parental controls had been established on these devices, this kind of thing would not happen.

Whilst I sympathize with parents who lose children to social media in terms of, not sure how to put that but again I think you know what I mean, it is NOT the responsibility of Social Media companies to monitor every new account created and what it's being used for. Parents have to take responsibility for their actions or lack of actions in keeping their children safe online.

The number of parents who accuse me of being "controlling" and "invading my children's privacy" by making sure they are safe online, is nuts, a lot of parents nowadays really do believe children aged from 11-18 can be trusted to know what's best for themselves when the truth is the exact opposite. There are groups created in schools on Snap/insta/whatsapp just to insult and abuse other students and parents have no idea, how dangerous this is, until someone dies and then they state publicly "it's the company's fault" when the truth is, parents need to always monitor their children's online activity.

Retro Stu 2/9/2024, 2:12:22 PM

An interesting question for sure. My initial gut instinct is set it at the higher end of things as default, that way if someone wants to change them then they have to familiarise themselves with the settings and control panels. By having them set to off as default it's leaving people open to seeing content that's inappropriate and let's face it, some of the settings are a nightmare to find being as buried far down a menu as possible.

It's interesting too that Twitch operate in a similar way, the ability to stop banned people viewing your channel is set to off as default, so even if you've banned someone they can still watch and hear everything you're doing. To have that off as default feels so silly, and I wonder whether it's likely a "we can still get ad revenue from them" tact.

Totally agree with EveOnlineTutorials, parents do need to take responsibility for checking these settings before they let their kids loose into the wild west of social media. There's accountability needed from both sides; from the parents to ensure the settings are correct and from the platforms to default to a safety net and allow people to opt out if it's appropriate. If parents don't understand the platform or it's privacy settings etc. then they shouldn't be letting their kids on them either.

klobbersaurus68 2/9/2024, 2:29:37 PM

I think they should be set to the max by default. As someone who grew up with unlimited access to fairly early internet, I saw a lot of stuff I shouldn't have at 10 years old. It wasn't hard to find the stuff, it generally was just right there in the open.

Even with the "rules" social media has in place, there is so much stuff that young people (and people in generally) shouldn't see without flat out selecting it. While parents do need to be involved in this stuff, being able to have it secured and reduce the chances of their kids stumbling on to whatever the content is would be helpful.

As evil empire as Amazon can be, they've really done good with their 'Kid Kindles' that when you set them up, the restrictions are turned on by default and you can remove/adjust before releasing the device to your kid.

Sturmer 2/11/2024, 11:13:26 PM

it's 2024 and I'm still looking for an option to block certain youtube channels on my kid's devices.

As for the default settings, i think thats should be determined on 1st access/registration, when you provide DOB. Sure, any teenager can select 1983, but i do not see any other way to verify user age at this point.