Younger people in America could teach their parents a thing or two about responsible behaviour online, according to US research organisation Pew Research Center. Meanwhile older people are more likely to be careless about how they are managing their personal online reputation.

Partly this may be because, as a senior Pew researcher put it in the New York Times, 18-25 year olds are at “a time in life when there’s a lot of attention being paid to self-presentation”.

It’s likely however, that this is the natural evolution of behaviour on the social web. People who have been on the web longer are developing the skills they need to look after their identity and reputation, and perhaps also have a keener sense of its value.

Pew’s research points out a set of habits which younger people are more likely to have – and they read like a list of considerations for everyone online:

They take steps to limit the amount of personal information available about them online—44% of young adult internet users say this, compared with 33% of internet users between ages 30-49, 25% of those ages 50-64 and 20% of those ages 65 and older.

They change privacy settings – 71% of social networking users ages 18-29 have changed the privacy settings on their profile to limit what they share with others online. By comparison, just 55% of SNS [social network service] users ages 50-64 have changed the default settings.

They delete unwanted comments – 47% social networking users ages 18-29 have deleted comments that others have made on their profile, compared with just 29% of those ages 30-49 and 26% of those ages 50-64.

They remove their name from photos – 41% of social networking users ages 18-29 say they have removed their name from photos that were tagged to identify them, compared with just 24% of SNS users ages 30-49 and only 18% of those ages 50-64.

Perhaps initiatives to spread digital knowledge among older people like Teach Your Granny How to Text will evolve into “Teach your parents how to restrict access to their office party photos”. Or they could read Me and My Web Shadow, of course…

• The findings come from Pew’s report Reputation Management and Social Media, which is free to download.
• Via New York Times