`I make up a silly name': Understanding Children's Perception of Privacy Risks Online

Children under 11 are often regarded as too young to comprehend the implications of online privacy. Perhaps as a result, little research has focused on younger kids' risk recognition and coping. Such knowledge is, however, critical for designing efficient safeguarding mechanisms for this age group. Through 12 focus group studies with 29 children aged 6-10 from UK schools, we examined how children described privacy risks related to their use of tablet computers and what information was used by them to identify threats. We found that children could identify and articulate certain privacy risks well, such as information oversharing or revealing real identities online; however, they had less awareness with respect to other risks, such as online tracking or game promotions. Our findings offer promising directions for supporting children's awareness of cyber risks and the ability to protect themselves online.

[1]  Jun Zhao,et al.  X-Ray Refine: Supporting the Exploration and Refinement of Information Exposure Resulting from Smartphone Apps , 2018, CHI.

[2]  Edward F. McQuarrie,et al.  Focus Groups: Theory and Practice , 1991 .

[3]  Adam,et al.  From Nosy Little Brothers to Stranger-Danger : Children and Parents ’ Perception of Mobile Threats , 2016 .

[4]  Neil Selwyn,et al.  'My Data, My Bad ...': Young People's Personal Data Understandings and (Counter)Practices , 2017, SMSociety.

[5]  K. Williams,et al.  Understanding bullying and victimization during childhood and adolescence: a mixed methods study. , 2011, Child development.

[6]  Leah Zhang-Kennedy,et al.  Cyberheroes: The design and evaluation of an interactive ebook to educate children about online privacy , 2017, Int. J. Child Comput. Interact..

[7]  S. Chaiklin.  The zone of proximal development in Vygotsky's analysis of learning and instruction. , 2003 .

[8]  D. Neumann,et al.  Touch Screen Tablets and Emergent Literacy , 2013, Early Childhood Education Journal.

[9]  Leah Zhang-Kennedy,et al.  Teaching with an Interactive E-book to Improve Children's Online Privacy Knowledge , 2016, IDC.

[10]  Sonia Livingstone,et al.  Report: In the Digital Home, How do Parents Support Their Children and Who Supports Them? , 2018, Children and Young People Now.

[11]  Sharon Judge,et al.  Using Mobile Media Devices and Apps to Promote Young Children’s Learning , 2015 .

[12]  Anil Kumar.  Understanding Privacy , 2010 .

[13]  Sayamindu Dasgupta,et al.  Youth Perspectives on Critical Data Literacies , 2017, CHI.

[14]  G. Loewenstein,et al.  Privacy and human behavior in the age of information , 2015, Science.

[15]  Allison Druin,et al.  Co-designing Mobile Online Safety Applications with Children , 2018, CHI.

[16]  Allison Druin,et al.  The Role of Children in the Design Technology , 1999 .

[17]  Pamela J. Wisniewski,et al.  The Privacy Paradox of Adolescent Online Safety: A Matter of Risk Prevention or Risk Resilience? , 2018, IEEE Security & Privacy.

[18]  ChettyMarshini,et al.  'No Telling Passcodes Out Because They're Private' , 2017 .

[19]  Lakshminarayanan Subramanian,et al.  Realizing privacy by definition in social networks , 2014, APSys.

[20]  Ofcom,et al.  Children and parents: media use and attitudes report , 2015 .

[21]  Kieron O'Hara,et al.  The Seven Veils of Privacy , 2016, IEEE Internet Comput..

[22]  Lisa Gibbs,et al.  Exploring the use of emoji as a visual research method for eliciting young children’s voices in childhood research , 2018 .

[23]  J. Dunn,et al.  ‘It’s more funner than doing work’: children’s perspectives on using tablet computers in the early years of school , 2018 .

[24]  Alessandro Acquisti,et al.  Misplaced Confidences , 2013, WEIS.

[25]  S. Livingstone.  Children: a special case for privacy? , 2018 .

[26]  Helen Nissenbaum,et al.  Contextual Integrity through the Lens of Computer Science , 2017, Found. Trends Priv. Secur..

[27]  Fernando Mourão,et al.  Privacy for Children and Teenagers on Social Networks from a Usability Perspective: A Case Study on Facebook , 2017, WebSci.

[28]  Mary Beth Rosson,et al.  Parents Just Don't Understand: Why Teens Don't Talk to Parents about Their Online Risk Experiences , 2017, CSCW.

[29]  Jun Zhao,et al.  Third Party Tracking in the Mobile Ecosystem , 2018, WebSci.

[30]  Andrea Bunt,et al.  Involving children in content control: a collaborative and education-oriented content filtering approach , 2014, CHI.

[31]  J. Fleiss.  Measuring nominal scale agreement among many raters. , 1971 .

[32]  L. Jackson.  ‘Won’t Somebody Think of the Children?’ Emotions, child poverty, and post-humanitarian possibilities for social justice education , 2014 .

[33]  H. Nissenbaum.  Privacy as contextual integrity , 2004 .

[34]  F. Mishna,et al.  Ongoing and Online: Children and youth's perceptions of cyber bullying , 2009 .

[35]  M. Whalley.  Involving parents in their children's learning , 2001 .

[36]  Joseph Krajcik,et al.  A Scaffolding Design Framework for Software to Support Science Inquiry , 2004, The Journal of the Learning Sciences.

[37]  Lesley-Anne Ey,et al.  Exploring young children’s understanding of risks associated with Internet usage and their concepts of management strategies , 2011 .

[38]  Steve Jones,et al.  U.S. College Students' Internet Use: Race, Gender and Digital Divides , 2009, J. Comput. Mediat. Commun..

[39]  Sonia Livingstone,et al.  Conceptualising privacy online: what do, and what should, children understand? , 2018 .

[40]  Daniel J. Weitzner,et al.  No surprises: measuring intrusiveness of smartphone applications by detecting objective context deviations , 2013, WPES.

[41]  Linda Miller,et al.  Theories and approaches to learning in the early years , 2011 .

[42]  Louise Barkhuus.  The mismeasurement of privacy: using contextual integrity to reconsider privacy in HCI , 2012, CHI.

[43]  Sonia Livingstone,et al.  Children's online activities, risks and safety: a literature review by the UKCCIS evidence group , 2017 .

[44]  Yang Wang,et al.  Folk Models of Online Behavioral Advertising , 2017, CSCW.

[45]  Faith Gibson,et al.  Conducting focus groups with children and young people: strategies for success , 2007 .

[46]  Sonia Livingstone,et al.  What do parents think, and do, about their children’s online privacy? , 2018 .

[47]  Julie A. Kientz,et al.  Screen Time Tantrums: How Families Manage Screen Media Experiences for Toddlers and Preschoolers , 2016, CHI.

[48]  John Schacter,et al.  Improving low-income preschoolers mathematics achievement with Math Shelf, a preschool tablet computer curriculum , 2016, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[49]  Richard House.  Theories and approaches to learning in the early years , 2011 .

[50]  Nicky Britten,et al.  Hearing children's voices: methodological issues in conducting focus groups with children aged 7-11 years , 2002 .

[51]  Pamela J. Wisniewski,et al.  Risk-taking as a Learning Process for Shaping Teen's Online Information Privacy Behaviors , 2015, CSCW.

[52]  Pamela J. Wisniewski,et al.  Parental Control vs. Teen Self-Regulation: Is there a middle ground for mobile online safety? , 2017, CSCW.

[53]  Sebastian Günther.  Folk Models of Home Computer Security , 2012 .

[54]  Sandra Mathison,et al.  Researching Children's Experiences , 2008 .

[55]  Sonia Chiasson,et al.  A day in the life of jos: a web-based game to increase children's digital literacy , 2018, IDC.

[56]  Rahul Bhargava,et al.  Approaches to Building Big Data Literacy , 2015 .

[57]  Michael E. Kummer,et al.  When Private Information Settles the Bill: Money and Privacy in Google's Market for Smartphone Applications , 2016, Manag. Sci..

[58]  Anthony D. Miyazaki,et al.  Protecting children's privacy online: How parental mediation strategies affect website safeguard effectiveness , 2008 .

[59]  Pamela J. Wisniewski,et al.  Safety vs. Surveillance: What Children Have to Say about Mobile Apps for Parental Control , 2018, CHI.

[60]  H. Daniels.  An introduction to Vygotsky , 1996 .

[61]  David A. Wagner,et al.  Android Permissions Remystified: A Field Study on Contextual Integrity , 2015, USENIX Security Symposium.

[62]  Natalia Criado,et al.  Implicit Contextual Integrity in Online Social Networks , 2015, Inf. Sci..

[63]  Tony Malim,et al.  Developmental Psychology: From Infancy to Adulthood , 1988 .

[64]  E. Pomerantz,et al.  Parents' involvement in children's learning in the United States and China: implications for children's academic and emotional adjustment. , 2011, Child development.

[65]  Tanya Byron.  Do we have safer children in a digital world? A review of progress since the 2008 Byron Review , 2010 .

[66]  Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez,et al.  “Won’t Somebody Think of the Children?” Examining COPPA Compliance at Scale , 2018, Proc. Priv. Enhancing Technol..

[67]  Maxine Birch,et al.  Researching children's experience. Approaches and methods , 2006 .

[68]  Sonia Livingstone,et al.  Children's Privacy Online: Experimenting with Boundaries Within and Beyond the Family , 2006, Computers, Phones, and the Internet.

[69]  Menno D. T. de Jong,et al.  The privacy paradox - Investigating discrepancies between expressed privacy concerns and actual online behavior - A systematic literature review , 2017, Telematics Informatics.

[70]  Maya Cakmak,et al.  Toys that Listen: A Study of Parents, Children, and Internet-Connected Toys , 2017, CHI.

[71]  M. Chandler,et al.  Small-scale deceit: deception as a marker of two-, three-, and four-year-olds' early theories of mind. , 1989, Child development.

[72]  Brenna McNally,et al.  Co-designing online privacy-related games and stories with children , 2018, IDC.

[73]  Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez,et al.  "Is Our Children's Apps Learning?" Automatically Detecting COPPA Violations , 2017 .

[74]  Andrew K. Przybylski,et al.  Digital childhood addressing childhood development milestones in the digital environment , 2017 .

[75]  Sonia Livingstone,et al.  When do parents think their child is ready to use the internet independently , 2018 .

[76]  Michail Kalogiannakis,et al.  Comparing Tablets and PCs in teaching Mathematics: An attempt to improve Mathematics Competence in Early Childhood Education , 2016 .

[77]  Curtis R. Taylor,et al.  The Economics of Privacy , 2016 .

[78]  M. Colwell,et al.  Secret keepers: children's theory of mind and their conception of secrecy , 2016 .

[79]  Tamara L. Clegg,et al.  'No Telling Passcodes Out Because They're Private' , 2017, Proc. ACM Hum. Comput. Interact..