With a click or a keystroke, teens shed privacy using apps

The games he plays know his location at any given moment through the phone’s GPS technology. He has entered his parents’ credit card number to buy apps, and iTunes has his family’s e-mail address and everyone’s full names. Facebook knows his birth date and the school he attends.

At an age when his parents do not let him go to the mall alone and in an era when he would never open up to a stranger, Fitzsimones, who lives in Phoenix, already has a growing dossier accumulating on the Web.

And while Congress has passed laws to protect the youngest Internet users from sharing much information about themselves, once those children become teens, the same privacy rules no longer apply.

“It’s the Wild West for teens when it comes to privacy online,’’ said Kathryn Montgomery, a privacy advocate and communications professor at American University in Washington.

Recent problems with Internet privacy and security — such as the recent breaches at Sony’s online gaming network — have led to renewed calls for regulations to protect consumers.

Representatives Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Joe Barton, Republican of Texas, are working on a bill to limit the collection of personal information about teens and prevent targeted marketing to them.

Adolescents are among the most voracious and precocious users of new mobile Internet services, making decisions with grown-up consequences, specialists say. But, according to Montgomery, “Their ability to make decisions is still forming and clearly different from that of adults.’’

With few restraints, teens are creating digital records that can be reviewed by prospective employers, insurance companies, and colleges.

Web firms say sensitive data can be collected only with permission and that parents can set controls on phones and desktop computers to help keep teens out of the public eye. But for teens like Fitzsimones, the opportunities to share information online are so frequent and routine that they rarely stop to think about them.

The first time he was asked to share his location on the game Pocket God, the seventh-grader paused to consider why the company would want to know his whereabouts.

But he feared that if he did not agree, his experience on the app would be limited, and Fitzsimones wanted to get started on his cartoon pygmy adventure on Oog Island. So he tapped OK, feeling comfort in the masses; his friends, after all, were using the app and never complained.

Since then, such decisions have been easier. He agreed when Angry Birds, Pandora, and other apps asked to track his location. “I never say no. It’s more annoying than anything when they ask, but I’m used to it now,’’ said Fitzsimones, now 14.

Such decisions are often done under stressful conditions and without enough information about the risks involved, privacy advocates say. Social pressures play out on the Internet, and teens are often tested on how much they are willing to expose to play games and participate in social networks.

Bolt Creative, which runs Pocket God, said its social networking partner, Open Feint, gets the location data so users can see how their scores rank among people in their vicinity.

A 2009 paper by neurobiologists and marketing specialists at the University of California at Irvine reported that teens were more susceptible than adults to online advertising and take greater risks with their information online.

The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that makes planned and rational decisions, doesn’t fully develop until the 30s, according to the UC Irvine report.