A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center reveals that most Americans online (~75%) understand the requirements for a strong password and that they should not conduct sensitive transactions on public WIFI, but beyond that, their online security literacy drops significantly. For example, only about 54% can identify a phishing attack (which suggests that half of adults online are clicking on suspicious links); only 39% understand the private browsing is not private from their ISP; and only 10% can identify an example of multi-factor authentication. What is surprising about this data is that while education is a factor in online security literacy, age is less so. Users aged 65 and older were seemingly just as knowledgeable as users in the age range of 18-29; while online literacy bias in general is weighted toward younger users, the Pew survey suggests that overall there is a shared standard of what we know and what we don’t know.
Our complicated relationship with Facebook is rooted in this murky understanding of online security and how the web works. When Facebook was founded in 2004 access was limited first to Harvard students and then opened to other colleges before extending to high school students and then the general public. From the very beginning the requirement for joining the site was rooted in transparency: you need a valid email address to join—in the early days of the platform, that meant an email address registered to the college you were attending—and you need to reveal your name. Connecting with others was dependent upon revealing a fundamental aspect of self, which countered the online expectations of an experience mediated by a username that afforded the individual some anonymity.
Through gradually widening circles of inclusion, Facebook normalized sharing facets of a person’s real identity. Sharing names in a closed social community such as a college campus is easy but as people move on and their offline networks grew wider, the business decision to open Facebook to everyone under this guise of increasing and maintaining connectivity and relevance to users eased user into sharing their names—and the other aspects of self—with a widening audience of both people and services.