How do elementary school-aged children conceptualize privacy and security online? Below I share findings and recommendations from a paper I wrote with co-authors Shalmali Naik, Utkarsha Devkar, Marshini Chetty, Tammy Clegg, and Jessica Vitak. I’ll present this paper at the 2018 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW).
What did we do? Children under age 12 increasingly go online, but few studies examine how children perceive and address privacy and security concerns. Using a privacy framework known as contextual integrity to guide our analysis, we interviewed children and their parents to understand how children conceptualize privacy and security online, what strategies they use to address any risks they perceive, and how their parents support them when it comes to privacy and security online.
How did we do it? We interviewed 26 children ages 5-11 and 23 parents from 18 families in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. We also walked through a series of hypothetical scenarios with children, which we framed as a game. For example, we asked children how they imagined another child would respond when receiving a message from an unknown person online.
What did we find? Children recognized how some components of privacy and security play out online, but those ages 5-7 had gaps in their knowledge. For example, younger children did not seem to recognize that sharing information online makes it visible in ways that differ from sharing information face-to-face. Children largely relied on their parents for support, but parents generally did not feel their children were exposed to privacy and security concerns. They felt such concerns would arise when children were older, had their own smartphones, and spent more time on social media.
What are the implications of this work? As the lines between offline and online increasingly blur, it is important for everyone, including children, to recognize (and remember) that use of smartphones, tablets, laptops, and in-home digital assistants can raise privacy and security concerns. Children absorb some lessons through everyday use of these devices, but parents have an opportunity to scaffold their children’s learning. Younger children may also be more willing to accept advice from their parents compared to teenagers. Parents would benefit from the creation of educational resources or apps that focus on teaching these concepts to younger children. The paper explains how the contextual integrity framework can inform the development of such resources.
Read the CSCW 2018 paper for more details!
Citation: Priya Kumar, Shalmali Milind Naik, Utkarsha Ramesh Devkar, Marshini Chetty, Tamara L. Clegg, and Jessica Vitak. 2017. ‘No Telling Passcodes Out Because They’re Private’: Understanding Children’s Mental Models of Privacy and Security Online. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 1, CSCW, Article 64 (December 2017), 21 pages. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3134699
Parts of this entry were cross-posted on the blogs of UMD’s Privacy Education and Research Laboratory (PEARL) and Princeton HCI.
Priya Kumar 
That’s a very informative article. I think it will help a lot of parents as well as the children.
Saloni
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