Facebook's Gettin' Fiesty!

Study: Facebook users getting less friendly


Women are much more likely than men to restrict their profiles.

People with the highest levels of education reported having the most difficulty figuring out their privacy settings. That said, only 2 percent of social media users described privacy controls as "very difficult to manage."

The report found no significant differences in people's basic privacy controls by age.

Young adults were more likely than older people to delete unwanted comments.

Men are more likely to post something they later regret.

Young adults were more likely to post something regrettable than their older counterparts

Whether it's pruning friends lists, removing unwanted comments or restricting access to their profiles, people are getting more privacy-savvy on social networks, a new report found. The report released Friday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that people are managing their privacy settings and their online reputation more often than they did two years earlier. For example, 44 percent of respondents said in 2011 that they deleted comments from their profile on a social networking site. Only 36 percent said the same thing in 2009. The findings come a day after the Obama administration called for stronger privacy protections for people who use the Internet, mobile devices and other technologies with increasingly sophisticated ways of tracking them. Pew's findings suggest that people not only care about their privacy online but that, given the tools, they will also try to manage it. Along those lines is "profile pruning," which Pew reports is on the rise. Nearly two-thirds of people on social networks said last year that they had deleted friends, up from 56 percent in 2009. And more people are removing their names from photos than two years ago.

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