Going private: college students are keeping more of their lives offline. Will high school students follow their lead?

• Author: Holson, Laura M.
• Position: TECHNOLOGY

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Then she was 17, Min Liu got a Facebook account and began to chronicle her social life in detail, from rooftop parties with college friends to dancing at a downtown club. But now that she's 21, Liu, a liberal arts major at The New School in New York, is having second thoughts.

Concerned about her career prospects, she asked a friend to take down a photograph of her wearing a tight dress at a party. When the woman overseeing her internship asked to join her Facebook circle, Liu agreed, but limited access to her Facebook page. "I want people to take me seriously," she says.

Like Liu, many young adults are rethinking privacy on social networking sites. But some evidence suggests that younger teens may not have had enough experience to understand the downside to oversharing online. One 16-year-old in Essex, England, learned the hard way: She was fired after posting on Facebook that her office job was boring.

A recent survey by the University of California, Berkeley, found that more than half of young adults questioned are more concerned about privacy than they were five years ago. And research by the Pew Internet Project has found that people in their 20s exert more control over their digital reputations than older adults do, deleting unwanted posts and limiting information about themselves.

The erosion of privacy has become a pressing issue for users of social networks. Last December, Facebook announced that parts of user profiles that had been private, like friends and relationship status, would become public. Users had to sort through about 150 options to customize their privacy settings.

Who Can See What?

After a storm of criticism from users, privacy advocates, and lawmakers, Facebook relented. Mark Zuckerberg, the company's 26-year-old CEO, introduced a new set of privacy controls in May that he said would help users understand what they were sharing online and who had access to it.

Facebook raised further privacy concerns last month when it introduced Places, a service that allows users to announce where they are. Using a smartphone, they can check in at a restaurant, for example, alerting Facebook friends. They can also "tag" friends, revealing their locations too--a concern for some privacy advocates. But according to Facebook, users of Places can control who sees their check-ins, untug themselves, or disable tagging altogether.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, however, says Facebook has...