Fakesbook: A social networking platform for teaching security and privacy concepts to secondary school students

As frequent users of social networking applications, middle and high school students are well-suited for curricular interventions that leverage these technologies. Allowing students to see "behind the curtain" of these applications provides them with a unique opportunity to better understand the discipline of computer science upon which these technologies are built and influences their perceptions of computer security and privacy. We present a novel social networking simulation that allows students to create a social network account, including profile data and images, and to manage privacy settings and friend connections. The platform, named Fakesbook, presents students with a visualization of the social network as a graph, enabling them to observe the spread of profile data (theirs and others') depending on friend connections and choices of privacy settings. We additionally present our lab curriculum which uses Fakesbook to enable active learning and adversarial thinking to engage students and build agency with regard to privacy and computing concepts. We deployed and, over several years, evaluated our platform and curriculum with hundreds of students from a diverse set of backgrounds at educational events designed to introduce these populations to computer science, cybersecurity, and privacy. Survey results indicate that students gained or deepened their understanding of online privacy and security and that 86% of participants found that Fakesbook helped them "think about privacy and computer security."