Strengthening Children’s Privacy Literacy through Contextual Integrity

Abstract

Researchers and policymakers advocate teaching children about digital privacy, but privacy literacy has not been theorized for children. Drawing on interviews with 30 families, including 40 children, we analyze children’s perspectives on password management in three contexts—family life, friendship, and education—and develop a new approach to privacy literacy grounded in Nissenbaum’s contextual integrity framework. Contextual integrity equates privacy with appropriate flows of information, and we show how children’s perceptions of the appropriateness of disclosing a password varied across contexts. We explain why privacy literacy should focus on norms rather than rules and discuss how adults can use learning moments to strengthen children’s privacy literacy. We argue that equipping children to make privacy-related decisions serves them better than instructing them to follow privacy-related rules.

Learning by doing oder doing by learning? Die Wechselwirkung zwischen Online- Privatheitskompetenz und Datenschutzverhalten

“…Online-Privatheitskompetenz wurde schon früh als Kombination aus verschiedenen Wissensdimensionen operationalisiert (Hoofnagle et al, 2010;Park, 2013;Turow, 2003) und bereits in zahlreichen Werken untersucht (Baruh et al, 2017;Epstein & Quinn, 2020;Kumar et al, 2020;Park, 2013;Park & Jang, 2014;Rosenthal et al, 2019). Zusammenfassend definieren Trepte et al (2015) Privatheitskompetenz zunächst als Kombination aus deklarativem und prozeduralem Wissen über Online-Privatheit.…”

The 5Ds of privacy literacy: a framework for privacy education

“…In other words, privacy is a practice – something people do with technologies. This means that people are privacy literate when they enact information flows in a way that aligns with the norms of the social context in which they are operating (Kumar, 2022; Kumar et al , 2020). Thus, privacy literacy is less about knowing facts or rules and more about evaluating the social consequences of information flows.…”

“…But, like, sometimes if me and my friends are working together and she wants to look something up on my Chromebook and [she’s] my really close friend who I trust, I just tell her my password and she tells me her password and like […]. I know that she’s not going to tell anyone else because I trust her.” (Kumar et al , 2020, p. 179).…”

“…Parents and teachers tell children not to share passwords with others, even though in practice both children and adults share passwords often. Instructing children not to share passwords does little to help them understand when password sharing is and is not appropriate (Kumar et al , 2020). In other words, rules like “Don’t share a password” do little to strengthen children’s privacy literacy.…”

Editorial: Children’s Voices on Privacy Management and Data Responsibilization

“…Rather, passwords are shared with friends and family on the basis of trust. Kumar et al (2020) therefore argue that-rather than merely memorizing and following rules that do not necessarily align with their practices-families need to "connect rules to norms and discuss rules in terms of contextually appropriate information flows" (p. 181) in order to allow children to grow, gain experience and develop privacy norms.…”