Children’s mobile communicative practices and locational privacy

Abstract

Children start using smartphones increasingly from early ages. This makes it more difficult for them to develop an understanding of online privacy and managing their personal data. Many parents monitor and regulate children’s online media use. However, they also encourage using smartphones to ensure the safety and security of their children. This study explores how children use smartphones in relation to their understanding of privacy of communication, content, data, and location. It examines data from 7 focus groups with arts-based methods conducted with 37 children in UK. The findings suggest that children think of their smartphones as a private communication technology and a private place, and they manage their locational privacy based on the necessity of using a mobile app and through adjusting the location settings on their phones. The findings also suggest that privacy of mobile data and user content are dependent on where mobile communication takes place.

Children's personal lives in the family: Achieving relational agency and individual privacy in intrafamilial relationships in Türkiye

“…Despite her parents' efforts to track Asya's online visibility, Asya kept coming up with strategies to reach her social media and maintain her privacy. This was also consistent with the findings of Özkul (2022) research with children aged 8–11 in the UK who thought of their online communication as private, more so, contextually private and audience‐sensitive, as revealed the research by Milkaite et al (2021) with children aged 9–13 in Belgium, as in the case of this research in which Asya made it available to her friends but not to her parents. The parents' concern did not appear to be related to potential threats from the social media platforms' privacy regulations, like reported in De Leyn et al (2022) research with tweens and their parents with a particular focus on children's TikTok uses in Flanders, Belgium.…”