What We’re Reading This Week: Teens and ID Theft, Role of Social Media in College Applications

Week of November  11, 2013

To help you keep up with what’s going on with kids, families, schools, and technology, we’ve compiled a list of stories, tips, and insights, we’ve found most useful over the past week.  What have you been reading? Tell us below or Tweet @TrendISKF.

TEENS’ SAFETY CONCERNS: Last week, I attended the 2013 Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI) conference in Washington D.C.  FOSI presented a new study on teens and identity theft and found that 51% of teens are very concerned about their identity being stolen.  However, only 29 percent of teens think they that they are personally vulnerable to having their identity stolen.  There were two other interesting data points that I gathered on the gap between attitudes and actions:

1. 50% of teens have shared their usernames and passwords with someone, and of those, 16%  were with parents and the remaining 34% with a friend or significant other.
2. Teens were very interested in learning how to protect their identity from an outside expert versus a parent, teacher, friend or online resource.

Conclusion: we’ve got a lot of work to do!

UNIVERSITIES TRACKING STUDENTS ON SOCIAL: According to a Kaplan questionnaire, 30 percent of college admissions officers said they had discovered information online that had negatively affected an applicant’s chances of being accepted to a school.  Universities like Colgate, Pomona and Southern Methodist University check on prospective students’ social activities and some high schools are working to prepare students for this process.

Conclusion:  The key for students?  How to balance using the Internet to highlight your strengths and stay connected to others while maintaining some privacy.  In my opinion, being invisible online is not an option.

FIREFOX BLOCKING COOKIES?: Mozilla announced earlier this year that it plans to automatically block certain cookies from the Firefox browser in an attempt to prevent tracking of users’ information. However, this effort has been delayed with pressure from the ad industry and attempts to work with the Cookie Clearinghouse to reach a compromise.

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