“It’s Your Private Information. It’s Your Life.” Young People’s views of personal data use by online technologies

Dowthwaite, Liz; Creswick, Helen; Portillo, Virginia; Zhao, Jun; Patel, Menisha; Perez Vallejos, Elvira; Koene, Ansgar; Jirotka, Marina

Abstract

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.

Citation

Dowthwaite, L., Creswick, H., Portillo, V., Zhao, J., Patel, M., Perez Vallejos, E., …Jirotka, M. (2020). “It’s Your Private Information. It’s Your Life.” Young People’s views of personal data use by online technologies. In IDC '20: Proceedings of the Interaction Design and Children Conference (121-134). https://doi.org/10.1145/3392063.3394410

• Conference Name: ACM Interaction Design and Children (IDC) conference 2020
• Start Date: Jun 17, 2020
• End Date: Jun 24, 2020
• Acceptance Date: Mar 23, 2020
• Publication Date: 2020
• Deposit Date: Apr 29, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 30, 2020
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Pages: 121-134
• Book Title: IDC '20: Proceedings of the Interaction Design and Children Conference
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3392063.3394410
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/4360284
• Publisher URL: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3392063.3394410