Viewing youth and mobile privacy through a digital policy literacy framework

Abstract

Digital policy literacy is a critical element of digital literacy that emphasizes an understanding of communication policy processes, the political economy of media, and technological infrastructures. This paper introduces an analytical framework of digital policy literacy and applies it to young people’s everyday negotiations of mobile privacy, in order to argue for increased policy literacy around privacy and mobile phone communication. The framework is applied to the Canadian context, where a small study engaged undergraduate university students in focus groups around their uses of mobiles and knowledge of mobile privacy issues. Findings reveal that while our participants were aware of a variety of privacy threats in mobile communication, they were not likely to participate in policy processes that might protect their privacy rights. The paper concludes with a discussion of why young people may not be motivated to intervene in policy processes and how their digital policy literacy around mobile privacy is mitigated by the construction of youth as a lucrative target consumer market for mobile devices and services.

App Users Unwittingly in the Spotlight: A Model of Privacy Protection in Mobile Apps

“…To construct knowledge items that were as comparable as possible for all 12 apps, we extracted three statements concerning the information collected by the app and two statements regarding with whom the information is shared from each privacy policy. According to Luzak () and Shade and Shepherd (), this is the most important information for Internet users. In case we could not select two statements regarding with whom information is shared, we included another statement on what the app is doing with the collected information.…”

From Data Ethics to Data Justice in/as Pedagogy (Dispatch)

“…Taking a cue from Leslie Shade's work on digital policy literacy, which foregrounds digital policy as a key attribute of media and digital literacy (Shade, 2012;Shade & Shepherd, 2013), I use "data justice literacy" as an intervention to broaden the principles of social media literacy to encircle data justice as a crucial element (Shade, 2012). In this respect, in order for us to be able to engage critically and effectively in personal, professional and social contexts through social media platforms, we need to understand how data is a key asset in our exchanges.…”

The Clickwrap: A Political Economic Mechanism for Manufacturing Consent on Social Media

“…More importantly, the literature suggests that the path to consent materials, whether clear or hidden, easy or difficult, may play a considerable role in the consent processes for social media services, as well as in the perpetuation of a problematic ignoring culture. The central focus of the current inquiry is the suggestion that clickwraps, as presently designed, may raise political economic concerns associated with the desire to keep users moving on a particular path toward monetized sections of services, as opposed to diverting attention away to a different pathone that might involve critical evaluations of infrastructure, business relationships, and policy (see Shade & Shepherd, 2013). Such a political economic revelation would suggest similarities to Herman and Chomsky's (1988) assertion in Manufacturing Consent that keeping individuals in a "buying mood" (p. 17) is a strategy for maintaining the status quo.…”