The generation of digital natives, known for sharing everything online, knows what to keep offline and how to protect themselves online better than older adults, many of whom don't know how much they're actually sharing, a Pew study, to be released soon, has found.

Researchers interviewed more than 2,200 people, and found that people ages 18 to 29 are more likely to monitor their privacy settings on social networking sites than older adults, The New York Times reported yesterday. This group is also more likely to remove their names from photos so they cannot be identified, and delete comments on their profiles.

Teens under age 18 were not interviewed, and because they are not yet in university or starting their careers, likely have different privacy concerns. However, "anecdotal evidence suggests that many of them have not had enough experience to understand the downside to oversharing," The Times article stated.

Social networking sites have a financial incentive for getting users to share as much as possible. Facebook has recently rolled out a much more open, much less private version, sharing users "like"s, profile pictures and shared links with the masses, as well as accidentally allowing users' friends to see private chats.

"Facebook originally earned its core base of users by offering them simple and powerful controls over their personal information. As Facebook grew larger and became more important, it could have chosen to maintain or improve those controls. Instead, it's slowly but surely helped itself -- and its advertising and business partners -- to more and more of its users' information, while limiting the users' options to control their own information," the Electronic Frontier Foundation noted. (Check out the EFF's "Facebook's Eroding Privacy Policy" for more background).

The social networking site's problem "is that they confuse the notion of the public sphere--that is, all of us--with the idea of making a public--that is, the small societies we create on Facebook or join on Twitter. Private v. public is not a binary decision; there is a vast middle inbetween that is about the control of our own publics," industry watcher Jeff Jarvis wrote for Business Insider.

Earlier this month, 15 privacy and consumer protection organisations filed a complaint with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, stating that Facebook manipulates privacy settings in order to make users' personal information available for commercial use, DNA India reported.