"It's your private information. it's your life.": young people's views of personal data use by online technologies

Conference item

Children and young people make extensive and varied use of digital and online technologies, yet issues about how their personal data may be collected and used by online platforms are rarely discussed. Additionally, despite calls to increase awareness, schools often do not cover these topics, instead focusing on online safety issues, such as being approached by strangers, cyberbullying or access to inappropriate content. This paper presents the results of one of the activities run as part of eleven workshops with 13-18 year olds, using co-designed activities to encourage critical thinking. Sets of 'data cards' were used to stimulate discussion about sharing and selling of personal data by online technology companies. Results highlight the desire and need for increased awareness about the potential uses of personal data amongst this age group, and the paper makes recommendations for embedding this into school curriculums as well as incorporating it into interaction design, to allow young people to make informed decisions about their online lives.

Authors: Dowthwaite, L; Creswick, H; Portillo, V; Zhao, J; Patel, M

• Alternative title: Conference paper
• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery
• Host title: IDC '20: Proceedings of the Interaction Design and Children Conference
• Pages: 121–134
• Publication date: 2020-06-21
• Acceptance date: 2020-03-24
• Event title: ACM International Conference on Interaction Design and Children (IDC 2020)
• Event location: Virtual London
• Event start date: 2020-06-17
• Event end date: 2020-06-24
• DOI: 10.1145/3392063.3394410
• ISBN: 9781450379816
• Language: English
• Keywords: personal data; children and young people; online technologies; FFR