Weeks 4 & 5: Privacy

Essential Question: What facets of digital privacy should a teacher emphasize to students?

Just as I sat down to begin crafting this blog post, I received an email from Cody Bennett, User Services Manager at UAS, with the subject line “Security Matters! Get Involved!” (C. Bennett, personal communication, September 30, 2020). The email discussed all the ways that students can get involved for Cybersecurity Awareness Month. Linked to the email was this video put out by StaySafeOnline.org about security and I think it is the perfect way to start this post!

If you enjoyed that video about password safety, you might want to check out the rest of the video series on this playlist.

CommonSense.org has devoted more than 15 years to researching and creating a guide for parents and teachers to teach students about using the internet safely. As their website notes, this is so important since “children require specific protection of their personal information, because they may be less aware of the risks, consequences, safeguards, and concerns and their rights in the processing of their personal information” (n.d.). 

Today’s students are considered ‘Digital Natives’ because they have never known a world without technology. It is very easy for us to forget that just because they have grown up with technology does not mean they know how to safely navigate it. “They’re young people, learning how to be adult people, and they learn how to be adults the way all humans learn: by making mistakes” (Doctorow, 2014). 

So now that we know why this is so important, let's answer the essential question: what should teachers emphasize about privacy to students? The best answer I could find to this question was through the Teaching Privacy project. This project is a National Science Foundation sponsored collaboration between the International Computer Science Institute and the University of California-Berkeley and they suggested teaching 10 principles for online privacy: 

1. You’re leaving footprints
2. There’s no anonymity
3. Information is valuable
4. Someone could listen
5. Sharing releases control
6. Search is improving
7. Online is real
8. Identity isn’t guaranteed
9. You can’t escape
10. Privacy requires work (Teaching Privacy, n.d.)

The principles above were echoed in an article published on The Guardian called “How do I keep my children safe online? What the security experts tell their kids” (Dredge, 2014). Many of the experts that were interviewed said that children should be educated early and reminded often that they should apply their offline standards to their online life. We need to teach and remind our students that even though the online world feels less real it carries just as much weight as the offline world around us. 

I’d like to end with this quote by Cory Doctorow (2014), “‘Privacy’ doesn’t mean that no one in the world knows about your business. It means that you get to choose who knows about your business.”

And here is the link to my personal journey again. 

Resources: 

Common Sense. (n.d.). Our Privacy Work. Retrieved October 05, 2020, from https://privacy.commonsense.org/resource/our-privacy-work 

Doctorow, C. (2014, December 15). You Are Not a Digital Native: Privacy in the Age of the Internet. Retrieved October 05, 2020, from https://www.tor.com/2014/05/27/you-are-not-a-digital-native-privacy-in-the-age-of-the-internet/

Dredge, S. (2014, August 11). How do I keep my children safe online? What the security experts tell their kids. Retrieved October 01, 2020, from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/11/how-to-keep-kids-safe-online-children-advice

Teaching Privacy. (n.d.). Retrieved October 05, 2020, from https://teachingprivacy.org/

StaySafeOnline.org. (2020). Security Awareness Episodes. [YouTube Playlist]. YouTube. Retrieved September 30, 2020 from https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7QHbjPSF0r6qJonaROIxVaMLzwDnZyOL