Understanding Children's Perception of Privacy Risks Online
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‘I make up a silly name’: Understanding Children’s Perception of Privacy Risks Online Jun Zhao Ge Wang Carys Dally [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Department of Computer Science. Department of Information Studies. Department of Experimental University of Oxford University College London Psychology. University of Oxford Oxford, UK London, UK Oxford, UK Petr Slovak∗ Julian Edbrooke-Childs† Max Van Kleek [email protected] [email protected] Nigel Shadbolt Department of Informatics, UCL Interaction Centre, University [email protected] King’s College London College London [email protected] London, UK London, United Kingdom Department of Computer Science. University of Oxford Oxford, UK ABSTRACT CCS CONCEPTS Children under 11 are often regarded as too young to compre- • Security and privacy → Social aspects of security and hend the implications of online privacy. Perhaps as a result, privacy; Privacy protections. little research has focused on younger kids’ risk recogni- tion and coping. Such knowledge is, however, critical for KEYWORDS designing efficient safeguarding mechanisms for this age Privacy, Family Technologies, Children, Tablet Computers, group. Through 12 focus group studies with 29 children aged Scaffolding 6-10 from UK schools, we examined how children described privacy risks related to their use of tablet computers and ACM Reference Format: Jun Zhao, Ge Wang, Carys Dally, Petr Slovak, Julian Edbrooke- what information was used by them to identify threats. We Childs, Max Van Kleek, and Nigel Shadbolt. 2019. ‘I make up a silly found that children could identify and articulate certain pri- name’: Understanding Children’s Perception of Privacy Risks On- vacy risks well, such as information oversharing or revealing line. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Pro- real identities online; however, they had less awareness with ceedings (CHI 2019), May 4–9, 2019, Glasgow, Scotland Uk. ACM, New respect to other risks, such as online tracking or game promo- York, NY, USA, 13 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300336 tions. Our findings offer promising directions for supporting children’s awareness of cyber risks and the ability to protect 1 INTRODUCTION themselves online. Today, children are spending more time online than with other media sources, such as watching television or playing ∗Also with UCL Interaction Centre, University College London. offline video games [48, 60]. Among the many kinds of de- †Also with Anna Freud National Centre for Children & Families. vices now connected to the Internet, mobile devices (such as arXiv:1901.10245v1 [cs.HC] 29 Jan 2019 tablet computers or smartphones) have become the primary means by which children go online [48]. In the UK, 44% of Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for children aged five to ten have been provided with their own personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies tablets, with this percentage increasing annually [60], while are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights in the US, ownership of tablets by children in this age group for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must grew fivefold between 2011 and 2013 [2]. Children under be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or five are also using smartphone and tablets more often,as republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific the category of apps designed for younger kids continues to permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]. expand rapidly [1, 60]. CHI 2019, May 4–9, 2019, Glasgow, Scotland Uk Whilst online content has opened up significant new op- © 2019 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. portunities and experiences for children to learn and have ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-5970-2/19/05...$15.00 fun [39, 58, 63, 67], parents and educators alike are raising https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300336 concerns about the rapid adoption of online content and apps by children, in particular as it relates to the amount of time importance of learning about potential risks through a mul- spent online, and online safety [36, 40, 47]. A recent survey titude of channels, such as school, parents, friends, siblings, has shown that parents consider privacy their primary con- and personal experiences [34, 81]. cern regarding their children’s use of the Internet [47]. This We identified significant gaps in children’s current aware- concern is driven, in part, by the view that children them- ness and understanding of two major forms of online risk: (i) selves are too young to understand the privacy risks they online recommendations, and (ii) implications of data track- might face [45, 49], which drives many parents to take a re- ing, i.e., the recording and sharing of data pertaining to what strictive approach to filter or monitor their children’s online they do online. Children remain poorly equipped to identify activity [41, 83]. Indeed, recent studies show how children’s targeted promotional material online, including adverts and ability to recognise risks online remains inadequate, and as in-app promotions, exploiting tracked activity data. We offer a result, the children are dependent on parents’ strategies recommendations on the development of tools to facilitate to keep them safe [41, 48, 50, 83]. Unfortunately, however, children’s understanding of privacy risks, and the need to parents themselves often feel they lack an adequate under- extend children’s awareness of implicit personal data access, standing of the landscape of potential risks online—ranging which is becoming ever more prevalent in the games and from bullying to cybercrime—making them uncertain about content they encounter [13, 20, 65]. the effectiveness of their mediation approaches [49]. We feel that it is important to understand children’s pri- 2 BACKGROUND vacy behaviours and conceptualisations not only because it might identify conceptual gaps in understanding that lead to Children’s Perception of Privacy better ways to educate and protect children online, but also Privacy has been described as a “concept in disarray”[69] because such behaviours have been shown to be indicative reflecting the complex and often overlapping conceptualisa- of later behaviours and attitudes [40, 41, 78]. To this end, tions. O’Hara proposed “seven veils” of privacy, spanning we build on recent work examining children’s perceptions the conceptual, factual, phenomenological, preferential, so- of online privacy risks [26, 41, 53, 83], and extend existing cietal, legal, and moral [61]. Practical research in privacy literature in two ways: first, by examining in detail how chil- has typically spanned multiple such veils; Livingstone sug- dren describe certain common kinds of risks, for the purpose gests that privacy is related to the keeping of information of understanding their conceptualisations of them; second, out of the public domain or the effective determination of we examine the risk coping strategies taken by the children what personal information is made available to whom [44]. for each distinct risk context. Specifically, we focus on the Nissenbaum’s theory of Contextual Integrity (CI) frames following three research questions: privacy as “the right to appropriate flow of personal informa- tion" [59] where what is “appropriate” is based on particular • R1: Perception - Do children care about privacy online? contexts and relationships. CI has been found to be a use- When they do, how do they describe privacy risks? ful practical framework to interpret people’s perceptions of • R2: Recognition - How do children recognise risks? privacy [10, 43]. What information do they use in the process? Managing privacy is becoming increasingly challenging, • R3: Response - How do children apply their existing given the vast (and growing) information asymmetries of knowledge in responding to risks in different scenar- the digital age [7], where data about people are harvested by ios, including threats they never experienced before? powerful platforms and vast networks in ways they do not What do such responses suggest about information understand nor recognise. Children are particularly suscepti- and knowledge that might be needed? ble in part due to them having little sense of the risks posed We report our results based on 12 focus groups with 29 chil- by the accumulation of personal data over time [62]. The dren, aged 6-10, from UK schools undertaken between June combination of such a lack of understanding, with incentives and August 2018. We found that children in our study had a put in place by apps and platforms to get people to share good understanding of risks related to inappropriate content, their data, have yielded the so-called ‘privacy paradox’, a the approach of strangers, and oversharing of personal infor- behaviour studied in teenagers [14] and adults [11] alike, mation online. However, they struggled to fully understand in which individuals act in ways contrary to their stated and describe risks related to online game/video promotions privacy preferences and concerns [37, 38, 62]. Recent studies and personal data tracking. Moreover, children’s risk coping showed that although teenagers from 14 to 18 were typi- strategies depended on their understanding of the risks and cally concerned about being personally identified by their their previous experiences: effective risk strategies were ap- personal data, they failed to perceive the potential threat of plied only if children recognised certain risks or when they re-identification via the particular fragments they shared, felt something untoward. These findings demonstrate the e.g., images or geo-location [62]. Whilst there has been extensive research on teenagers’ years, children start to build up friendships; however, at this perceptions of privacy, relatively little has been done for stage, family interactions are dominant, and many of their children aged below 11.