HUWY UK results so far

Over the last 4 months, groups of young people have been discussing HUWY topics and posting their experiences, thought and ideas on the HUWY website. Here are some of their ideas.

Most of the groups were concerned about the amount of information that people shared with social networking sites and why those sites, as commercial organisations, wanted this information and what they would do with it. e-business group 5 summed up many groups ideas with their 3 point recommendations:

• “People need to take responsibility for what they post
• Government should develop stricter privacy law
• and produce guidelines for the public on social networking.”

e-business group 4 gave companies more responsibilities: “We think that companies should have to sign up to an ethical code of practice. Web browsers should then have an icon - like the padlock for secure sites - that shows the user that this website has signed up to the ethical code of practice”

e-business 3 saw a problem with this idea: “Organisations should do this but difficult as it mightn't be in their interests” 

e-business 1 had a good user-centred idea: “We think that organisations should carry out a survey of what information their users are happy to share ... This would mean that consumers were deciding what information they were willing to share for themselves.

Many of the posts give insight into young people’s use of the Internet: it’s central to their lives.

Laura’s friends described Facebook as “a compulsory part of society. It is mandatory to own a Facebook account if you are a University student, most of whom log in to Facebook every day to check for notifications that may have cropped up since their last log in twenty minutes earlier.” At the same time, they worry about its place in their lives: “it is a form of social advertising, to boast about where one has travelled or how many times a week they go out drinking. For those without the highest self-esteem or lacking in social skills, it provides the option to create a different persona and the impression of having an active social life, when in reality, most of their free time is spent worrying about how they are perceived through the Facebook medium, thus desperately making amendments to it.”

Donegall Pass 1 spend a high proportion of their time online: “We mostly use it for chatting with friends on IM - it's far cheaper than phone or texting. We probably spend about 4 or 5 hours a day online and at least half of that time is spent on FaceBook.” Like most of the groups, they’re careful with their privacy, but not sure that their friends are: “We are mostly friends with people that we know, or who know people that we know. We wouldn't really accept friend requests from people that we don't know in real life.  We would check to see if he was friends with anyone we knew before accepting him. This doesn't work all the time though - some of our friends might not be as picky about who they're friends with so you always need to check who the people are.”

The Young Scot group that met in Clydebank covered some of the biggest HUWY topics: Privacy, Cyberbullying, child abuse and child safety. None of the group said that they, or anyone they knew, had experienced cyber bullying so weren’t able to bring any personal experiences to the discussion. They mostly felt that the networks and sites had more power to stop cyberbullying than teachers, parents or young people: “There was a feeling that all of these organisations had a duty to record incidents, and then act appropriately.  People should immediately have their accounts deleted if they are caught sending threatening or abusive messages through any of these methods.”

With the discussion on online safety and child pornography there were some very strong opinions about how awful it was and what should happen to people caught doing it, however their answers suggested that an individual’s own personal privacy was perhaps more important, or at least their own.  One participant felt that ‘political correctness had gone mad’ if people were questioned over innocent pictures of their own children.

Finally, the latest posters looked at HUWY topics in the light of “Wikileaks”. E-business group 6 noted that the companies holding our information are commercial companies, often in the US –wikileaks shows that these can be at the mercy of governments. E-business group 2 took an interesting angle: “We don't think that anything should be done about stopping leaked information. If you technically try to stop it happening then you're attacking the original concepts of the Internet- freedom of information, standardisation&rdquo- and added a logical suggestion: “If a business or government is worried about the security of their information then it is up to them to secure it, it shouldn't be a government's role to change the Internet to suit them. The organisations should be able to come up with technical solutions if they are worried about it.”

And the results reports from Young Scot Says Who are coming right up..