Link to article: http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2009/10/is-online-privacy-a-generational-issue/

To start the article, West divides internet users into two groups: digital immigrants and digital natives. Digital immigrants were born before the existence of certain digital technologies, which in this article is the internet. A digital native is someone who was born after the creation of these technologies and has grown up using them. In the context of the internet teenagers and young adults would be considered digital natives while middle-age and elderly internet users would be considered digital immigrants.

According to West, there is a perception that digital natives do not value their privacy as much as digital immigrants. This may be because digital immigrants think about their privacy in terms of the ability to conceal information from others. Digital natives on the other hand think about privacy as sharing certain information to specific groups and not to others.  This is why social networks, such as Facebook, now allow their users to choose what content they want to be public and what content they only want certain groups of people to see.

The article goes on to cite a Pew study about online privacy. According to the study, 60% of adults and 66% of teens restrict access to information on their social networking profiles. The article concludes by saying that privacy is not all or nothing, public or private. Instead we should expect to be able to choose the level of privacy that we want certain information to have. This allows us to have the benefits of communicating and sharing online without the loss of privacy that comes with it.