For four years, nearly 200 high school students in Dallas voluntarily allowed every text, email, and IM to be monitored. That these youth would sign off on such an invasion of privacy, especially in light of the content that was discovered within their communication, shows how much the next generation has changed their views on privacy. Students allowed a team of researchers to capture all of their messaging, whether it was completely innocent or contained swearing, sexual references, and even drug deals, to the tune of 500,000 texts per month in exchange for a free BlackBerry!
With a $3.4 million grant from the NIH, Dr. Marion Underwood from the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences at The University of Texas-Dallas embarked on the study with the goal of investigating the formation and maintenance of friendships as well as the dynamics of social and physical aggression. The students signed up in 2003 as 4th graders (with their parents consent) for the research, which at the time was named “The Friendship Project.”
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