Abstract
How do children understand the privacy implications of the contemporary digital environment? This question is pressing as technologies transform children’s lives into data which is recorded, tracked, aggregated, analysed and monetized. This article takes a child-centred, qualitative approach to charting the nature and limits of children’s understanding of privacy in digital contexts. We conducted focus group interviews with 169 UK children aged 11–16 to explore their understanding of privacy in three distinct digital contexts—interpersonal, institutional and commercial. We find, first, that children primarily conceptualize privacy in relation to interpersonal contexts, conceiving of personal information as something they have agency and control over as regards deciding when and with whom to share it, even if they do not always exercise such control. This leads them to some misapprehensions about how personal data is collected, inferred and used by organizations, be these public institutions such as their schools or commercial businesses. Children’s expectation of agency in interpersonal contexts, and their tendency to trust familiar institutions such as their schools, make for a doubly problematic orientation towards data and privacy online in commercial contexts, leading to a mix of frustration, misapprehension and risk. We argue that, since the complexity of the digital environment challenges teachers’ capacity to address children’s knowledge gaps, businesses, educators, parents and the state must exercise a shared responsibility to create a legible, transparent and privacy-respecting digital environment in which children can exercise genuine choice and agency.
Highlights
Children’s lives are traditionally conceptualized as part of the private sphere, supposedly protected from the public and commercial spheres by the actions of parents, teachers, and other carefully vetted adults
We suggest that data functions rather differently in each of these three privacy contexts: In interpersonal contexts, data meaningfully given is the prototypical case; in institutional contexts, data is often collected— as children know from their school or medical records— often not fully analysed (Selwyn, 2019); in commercial contexts, the really valuable data is not that given, nor even that taken, so much as the data that is inferred, aggregated and used to generate profiles in order to target advertising or for other profitable purposes within the networked data ecology (Lupton & Williamson, 2017; Marwick & boyd, 2014; Stoilova, Nandagiri, & Livingstone, 2019)
It seems that children largely regard the digital environment as a ‘personal space’ for self-expression and socializing and that, while children are often concerned about parental intrusion into their privacy, or with the interpersonal risks that arise when personal information circulates among peers without their consent, they have little awareness of future implications of data traces, in relation to a distant future that is hard to predict or to conceive of (Bowler, Acker, Jeng, & Chi, 2017; Murumaa-Mengel, 2015; Pangrazio & Selwyn, 2018)
Summary
Children’s lives are traditionally conceptualized as part of the private sphere, supposedly protected from the public and commercial spheres by the actions of parents, teachers, and other carefully vetted adults. Today children are a major source of data in a hugely profitable data marketplace (Zuboff, 2019) Their lives are, arguably, becoming datafied—meaning that their possibilities for action, and the affordances of their lifeworld, are influenced by practices of data processing determined by commercial and political priorities far beyond the control or knowledge of a child (Barassi, 2019; Lupton & Williamson, 2017; Mascheroni, 2018). Insofar as the digital environment is not designed or regulated to be legible and respectful of children’s rights or best interests (Buitelaar, 2018) these hopes may be unrealistic Both regulation and education policies rely on assumptions about what children can understand or withstand. Such a holistic approach, involving both regulatory and educational solutions aimed at empowering children and safeguarding their privacy and other rights, is increasingly advocated by a rights approach to privacy (Lievens, Livingstone, McLaughlin, O’Neill, & Verdoodt, 2018; Lupton & Williamson, 2017; UNICEF, 2018)
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