FREE! A great toolkit for young people to help them understand how to protect their data and privacy online.
Also free are accompanying toolkits and resources for parents and teachers!
The children’s toolkit can be found here. It is aimed at children of secondary school age to help them answer such questions as:
There are a number of really useful bite-sized modules with links to other activities, which are quick and easy to do.
There are separate, supporting toolkits for parents and educators:
http://www.lse.ac.uk/my-privacy-uk/for-parents
http://www.lse.ac.uk/my-privacy-uk/for-educators
The educator one provides information and free resources that can be recommended to children, used in the classroom or in a teacher’s own practice.
Key areas include:
- Online privacy: what’s the issue?
- Who is tracking us and collecting our data?
- How to protect privacy online.
LSE Research Project
These toolkits are available as one of the outcomes of a research project carried out by the London School of Economics (LSE), ‘Children’s Online Privacy and Commercial Use of Data: Growing up in a digital age.’ The LSE’s research report (47 pages) can be found here.
Key Points
A summary of the key points can be found on page 3 and includes:
Children care about their privacy online, and they want to be able to decide what information is shared and with whom.
Children tend to think of privacy online in terms of e-safety, struggling to grasp the relation between privacy and data – hence only e-safety risks seem truly real.
Children focus on data they know they give, much more than data that is taken or inferred – and they think all of it is ‘none of their business.’
Children’s media literacy – especially their critical knowledge of the data ecology – plays an important part in how they can understand, manage and safeguard their privacy.
Recommendations
There are 6 recommendations (page 43), including:
Sustained media (data, digital, critical) literacy is vital from an early age – in school curricula and teacher training – but it is not a ‘silver bullet’ solution. Children cannot and should not be expected to understand and manage the full complexity of the online environment, and some solutions need to happen at the level of regulation and design – a demand that children, parents and teachers insist on.
Support children by supporting parents, schools and the organisations that work with families and vulnerable children – adults are often left feeling ‘behind’ digital developments and struggling to identify the best ways to support children.
If you are interested in receiving regular updates like this; having access to advice on data protection issues whenever you need it; as well as templates and resources to support you in keeping your data safe, do get in contact!