KOALA Hero Toolkit: a new approach to inform families of mobile datafication risks

Conference item

Children today are deeply immersed in the online world, where their activities are routinely tracked, analysed, and monetised. This exposes them to various datafcation risks, including harmful profling, micro-targeting and behavioural engineering. Most existing measures focus on immediate online threats, rather than informing children about these implicit risks. In this paper, we present The KOALA Hero Toolkit, a hybrid toolkit designed to help children and parents jointly understand the datafcation risks posed by their mobile apps. Through user studies involving 17 families we evaluate how the toolkit infuenced families’ thought processes, perceptions and decision-making regarding mobile datafcation risks. Our fndings show that KOALA Hero supports families’ critical thinking and promotes family engagement. We identify future design recommendations for family support, featuring ideas such as integrating triggering moments and bonding moments in toolkit designs. This work provides timely inputs on global eforts aimed at addressing datafcation risks and underscores the importance of strengthening legislative and policy enforcement of ethical data governance.

Authors: Wang, G; Zhao, J; Kollnig, K; Zier, A; Duron, B

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery
• Host title: CHI '24: Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
• Volume: 8
• Article number: 226
• Publication date: 2024-05-11
• Acceptance date: 2024-01-19
• Event title: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2024)
• Event location: Honolulu, Hawai'i, USA
• Event website: https://chi2024.acm.org/
• Event start date: 2024-05-11
• Event end date: 2024-05-16
• DOI: 10.1145/3613904.3642283
• ISBN: 9798400703300
• Language: English
• Keywords: children online privacy; children online safety; family; mobile apps