Thinking differently about children's data privacy online

We researched how parents and children think about privacy when using internet  services and found that their expectations of privacy were out of sync with the realities of how personal information manifests in the digital environment. This means that while parents and children may guard their privacy offline, some aspects of their privacy online remained vulnerable. 

​

This is largely due to a lack of knowledge about how personal information is collected, aggregated, and created about us as we go about our daily digital lives, and how this data is used by the companies and institutions collecting our information. 

Although we aim to publish findings in academic journals (see our publications page), we felt that this lack of understanding about data in the digital world and the consequences of its uses by companies and institutions was an important milestone in realising children’s data privacy. To help families understand ‘personal data’ in the digital environment we decided to produce an animated video to explain how personal data is created and used online and what the consequences of this can mean in the longer term.