Facebook is changing the norms of what it means to be private, what it means to be a kid, and what it means to be a “human product.” As the phrase goes, if you are not paying for it, then you are not the customer, you are the product.
— JONATHAN TAPLIN, MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS1
Every year I play a trick on my seventh-grade classes. Instead of launching into one of our regularly scheduled lessons, I deliver the following special announcement: “The school principal just hired a research firm to help him customize the school to better meet your needs. To accomplish this task, researchers will be on campus for one week. During this time, they’ll be collecting personal information about you, such as your name, age, address, and so forth. They’ll also be following you around and tracking your habits, like where you go (including the restroom, lunch area, playground, etc.), how long you spend there, who you spend time with, and basically everything you do all day.”
As you have probably guessed, this ploy aims to make kids realize that every time they go online, to download an app, play a game, fill out a form, visit a website, buy a product, or do just about anything, their personal information and habits are being collected, sometimes without their knowledge or consent. I discovered this ingenious method of introducing students to the concept of “personal information and online privacy” in Common Sense Media’s Digital Citizenship lessons, which they offer free online. This lesson works every time.
You can imagine how indignant twelve- and thirteen-year-olds become when they hear this announcement. They complain bitterly about this egregious violation of their privacy. And when they do, I’m ready. Handing every student a piece of paper, I invite them to express their concerns in a letter to the school principal. For many, this is the first letter they’ve ever written! What they put down on paper is striking:
“This to me is an invasion of privacy and stalking.”
“They call it ‘personal info’ for a reason. If we gave it away, it would not be ‘personal’ anymore.”
“I don’t want to feel like a lab rat. Also, my mom said not to give personal information to strangers.”
“Who follows you around everywhere and keeps track of your every move? This is kind of creepy. Let me make this more clear: It is a lot creepy!”
“You know it’s illegal to ask children for their personal information without asking their legal guardians first.”
“I would like to know what they are going to do with this information.”
“I strongly believe in children’s rights to be safe.”
“These people have no right to know my habits or personal information.”
“I will not do this without my mother’s approval.”
“Just no. It’s creepy.”
Don’t you think it’s astonishing that kids who so readily sign up for apps and services without a care to either privacy or parental approval are so eager for it in this situation? Nevertheless, when I explain that no researchers will be coming to the school, but that whenever they go online, their personal information and habits are being collected as though researchers were living in their phones, they are stunned. Then I read their own words back to them.
That’s what really gets them. As one seventh-grade boy put it, “Wow. Mind blown.”
REALITY IS STRANGER THAN FICTION
If kids knew how close to reality this scenario is, their young minds would be blown. Attorney Bradley Shear, whom you met in Chapter 3, explains how personal information is being collected from schoolchildren in his blog, Shear on Social Media Law & Tech:
The type and amount of data being accumulated and stored by K–12 schools and third-party vendors is staggering. For example, some elementary schools deploy identification cards with RFID [radiofrequency identification] chips that track when and how many times our kids go to the bathroom, how long they spend inside a bathroom stall while taking care of their personal business, and how many times they go to the water fountain, along with all of their daily movements in and within the school’s property. Other schools utilize biometric palm readers that scan our kids’ hands or fingerprints to track everything our kids buy in the school cafeteria. All of this cumulative data is a honeypot for colleges, employers, insurance companies, data brokers, cybercriminals, foreign governments, etc.2
Shear, the father of two children in elementary school, says an immense amount of data is being collected from today’s students. “Schools are using free apps, and the personal data these apps collect is being sold, literally right under a parent’s nose,” says Shear.3 When Education Week interviewed him on this topic, he told them, “When I was young, I went to the library, I took out books on all kinds of crazy stuff, and that information wasn’t stored in the cloud to be analyzed by algorithms or sold to third-party advertisers. Our kids should have the same freedom.”4
Yet they don’t. Students today routinely divulge personal information, a task made easy thanks to technology, without fully understanding the possible consequences. Many seventh and eighth graders take the PSAT 8/9 Assessment. This is the precursor to the popular SAT, the College Board test that most college-bound high school students take. The personal information collected by the College Board includes name, grade level, sex, date of birth, student ID number or Social Security number, racial/ethnic group, military relation, home address, email address, mobile phone, grade point average, courses taken, and parents’ highest education levels. While it is not mandatory that students provide all this information (good luck collecting this data from my now-skeptical students next year, College Board!), most kids obediently and willingly do so anyway. What does the College Board do with this sensitive information? In a letter published in the Washington Post, Cheri Kiesecker, a Colorado parent and member of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, writes:
[T]he College Board’s privacy policy to parents and students claims they do not sell student data. Rather, they sell a license to access a student’s personal data. What is the difference? Indeed, this distinction seems only semantical.5
Consider the dozens, possibly hundreds or thousands, of free educational services and apps available to schools today. For instance, one of the most popular is Google’s G Suite for Education (formerly Google Apps for Education), an online learning management system designed specifically for schools. It incorporates Google Classroom (a free web service that lets teachers and students easily share work and assignments) with other free Google products like Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Sheets, and Slides. It’s an amazing resource that helps teachers stay organized, conduct quizzes, share information, and communicate with students—and the best part is, it’s entirely free! Who can fault a cash-strapped school or teacher for taking full advantage of such a deal? More than seventy million people actively use G Suite for Education today. Perhaps not surprisingly, Google openly acknowledged in 2016 that it “collects and data mines for some commercial purposes a wide range of personal information on student users who log in through its popular Apps for Education service, then venture to the company’s search engine and other products.”6 It’s not just apps that collect student data. Software on laptops, tablets, and computers used in school collect personal information, too— everything from birth dates to search histories.
Google tracks its users across other services it offers, including YouTube. In early 2018, a complaint filed with the FTC by twenty advocacy groups claimed YouTube routinely collects data on children under age thirteen. In its defense, YouTube says its terms of service state the site is not for viewers under age thirteen. Which is hard to believe, as it offers “cartoons, nursery rhyme videos, and those ever-popular toy-unboxing clips” that garner millions of views.7
In and out of school, kids give personal information to the apps, games, websites, and anything else they use. “All of this data may be used in ways never imagined,” says Shear. “We need to educate our kids about what is actually happening with their personal information when they use so-called ‘free’ digital products and services.”8
TEACHING KIDS ABOUT PERSONAL INFORMATION AND PRIVACY–PART 1
With all the possible perils the internet poses to minors, data mining of their personal information might seem low on the list of parental concerns, but it’s not. A 2015 report released by the Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI) states that while most parents believe technology affects their children’s lives in positive ways, they remain concerned about their children’s personal safety and privacy. FOSI found that parents are more concerned about privacy than about performance in school, social relationships, physical health, technology use, and behavior.9
Privacy isn’t just important to parents. “It’s very important to kids, too,” says Shauna Leff, vice president of marketing and communications of PRIVO, a company that provides a suite of privacy solutions for companies. “Starting in middle school, privacy becomes very important to kids,” she told me. “Their online lives become like their bedrooms. They want, and expect, to find privacy there.”
According to Leff, kids want something else, too. “They want engagement; they want customization. They want to be able to use free sites, like YouTube,” she explains. “But think about it: What does Google get out of it? Kids have to understand that everything online can’t just be free. There is a price to be paid.”10
That price is their personal information.
Learning the Price of “Free”
Learning that their personal information is a valuable commodity may be the most important lesson for children starting to use connected devices. I try to drive home this concept with my students through various activities that follow the introductory “announcement” at the beginning of this chapter. They are required to read the privacy policies and terms of service of the apps they use most: Snapchat, Instagram, etc. This comes after a basic vocabulary lesson that teaches them the meanings of words and phrases they’ll find in the fine print of every app or web service they will ever use—personal information, cookies, third parties, license, user content, location information, log file information, monetization, and so forth. Many adults don’t even fully understand these terms, even though they routinely see these words in the policies they skim and agree to when downloading apps and services to their own phones and computers.
COMMON PRIVACY POLICY TERMS
• Personal information: Includes your name, address, email address, phone number, age, etc.
• Cookies: Small files placed on your device by some sites you visit. Cookies enable sites to “remember” your data.
• Third party: “Party” is a legal term for a person or entity. A “third party” is a person or entity other than the one you may have entered into an agreement with.
• License: Official permission to do, use, or own something.
• User content: Includes words, images, videos, audio, memes, or anything else you post online.
• Location information: Information about where a device user is located. Apps and websites can determine location by using cellular, WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth, etc.
• Log file information: A log file records events that occur on a device and may include search queries, how web services were used, and information about crashes, hardware settings, browser type, and more.
• Monetization: The process of making money.
You’d think students would complain bitterly about the tedium of reading these excruciatingly long and boring policies. Instead, they attack them with zeal and are often appalled at what they find. Some of my students found this buried within the Snap Inc. terms of service: “Many of our Services let you create, upload, post, send, receive, and store content. When you do that, you retain whatever ownership rights in that content you had to begin with. But you grant us a license to use that content. How broad that license is depends on which Services you use and the Settings you have selected.”11 (emphasis added)
The part in italics grabbed their attention. “Snap” is short for Snapchat, the app they know and love because user content supposedly “disappears” after it is viewed by whomever it’s been shared with. Sure, most kids realize that friends can screenshot the content to keep and use elsewhere, but few suspected Snapchat of using their content. Upon further scrutiny, students discovered that for all content uploaded to the app, “you grant Snap Inc. and our affiliates a worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license to host, store, use, display, reproduce, modify, adapt, edit, publish, and distribute that content.”12
Additionally, students learned that if their “Snapchat Stories” were set to be viewable by “everyone,” any content in that story is “public content,” which means:
[T]he license you grant us for this content is broader. In addition to granting us the rights mentioned in the previous paragraph, you also grant us a perpetual license to create derivative works from, promote, exhibit, broadcast, syndicate, sublicense, publicly perform, and publicly display Public Content in any form and in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed). To the extent it’s necessary, when you appear in, create, upload, post, or send Public Content, you also grant Snap Inc., our affiliates, and our business partners the unrestricted, worldwide, perpetual right and license to use your name, likeness, and voice, including in connection with commercial or sponsored content.13 (emphasis added)
You might have to read these excerpts a couple of times to get the point. My students got it right away. They discovered that, even on this so-called “disappearing” app, the personal information and content they share doesn’t disappear at all.
A Third Party Asks What Students Think
A couple of weeks into these lessons, I was contacted by a producer from NBC’s Today Show, who asked if he could send a film crew to Journey School. He wanted to include us in a series they were producing about kids and technology. When I delivered this exciting news to the seventh graders, they didn’t believe me. I’d lost all credibility with that class after my “special announcement!”
Nevertheless, a few weeks later, a news crew did show up at school, and when NBC correspondent Jacob Soboroff asked a group of five students what they’d been learning in Cyber Civics, they wasted no time responding. “We’ve been learning about privacy policies and terms of agreement,” a bright young boy named Nicolas answered. I was surprised at how eager they were to tell Soboroff all about the boring legalese they’d been reading, and I think he was surprised, too. Especially when they told him that what they discovered “freaked them out” so much, they’d decided to delete some of their apps.
“You guys have friends obviously outside of this school and outside of this class. Do any of them read the terms of agreement on social media?” asked Soboroff.
“No,” they responded, laughing.14
When asked if they thought they knew more about the apps they use than their friends, all five heads bobbed up and down. “Absolutely,” one student answered. “I can’t believe how little most kids know.”
Understanding Personal Information = Smart Choices
NBC aired this segment the same day that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg broke his silence about the privacy scandal involving his social network and Cambridge Analytica, a voter-profiling company that collected and used the personal information of tens of millions of Facebookers. When the New York Times and The Guardian broke this story, Facebook’s stock quickly plunged by 7 percent (that’s a $37 billion hit, by the way). Even worse for the social media app, many considered quitting Facebook as the hashtag #DeleteFacebook started trending across the web. It was a big deal. But if you dig into this story, it makes you wonder if things would have been different had Facebook users been better educated, or at least curious, about how the personal information they willingly provided the social media network might be used. Here’s what happened: “A researcher named Aleksandr Kogan developed a personality-quiz app for Facebook. . . . About 270,000 people installed Kogan’s app on their Facebook account. But as with any Facebook developer at the time, Kogan could access data on users or their friends.”15 (emphasis original)
There’s more to the story than this, but the salient fact is that users whose personal information was shared likely didn’t read Facebook’s privacy policies carefully. Or understand they had the choice not to take the quiz. Or know how to customize their privacy settings. It’s becoming apparent that these are basic survival skills for citizens in a digital age.
That’s why it’s essential to teach kids that “free” has a price: their personal information. But, even more importantly, they should know that they can and should decide how much of their personal information to share on the web.
Be Aware: Kids Will Still Share
Even armed with this knowledge, kids will be tempted to share personal information online. “We are living in a Facebook era, where people are so excited to share everything, their every moment,” says Leff. “That’s fine, that’s great—if people have made a choice to do that. But everyone should be able to choose what they want to share and what they want to get in exchange.”16
Personally, I’ve made the choice, time and again, to share personal information in exchange for awesome services. I share my listening history with Spotify (a music app), and in exchange it gives me a tailored “daily mix” of songs it thinks I will like, based on my data. Strava, an exercise app that tracks my bike rides, asks me to share my age, which I readily do (even though I don’t do this nearly as readily in real life!). In exchange, it compares my performance to other riders that fall within my age range. That way, I don’t have to suffer the humiliation of being mercilessly outridden by nineteen-year-old “Mach 1 Racer.” Entirely worth it.
But like all fair exchanges, both parties should be fully aware of how the exchange works, even if one of those parties is a nine-year-old kid you’ve decided is old enough to play Roblox or Minecraft. When children download or sign up to use games, apps, music, or other services, they are inevitably going to be asked to share personal information. Most children will share their personal information, or yours. That’s right. When children use a parent’s device, which many do, the stored passwords, email addresses, credit card numbers, birth date, address, contacts, and other data on that device are often a quick click away from being shared by the child using that device.
Do I have your attention now? Good. Because helping your children understand that personal information should be protected and shared sparingly is really important. And this is only the beginning of what they should know about privacy and personal information. Why? Because not knowing about this next part puts our democracy at risk.
TEACHING KIDS ABOUT PRIVACY AND PERSONAL INFORMATION–PART 2
Way back in the days of a nascent internet, a short twenty-five years or so ago, many believed this magnificent new platform would be a boon for humankind because it would give everyone and anyone—regardless of race, age, gender, social status, or political persuasion—a voice. This “new public square,” as many called it, would be teeming with new ideas, divergent worldviews, and alternative solutions to problems—unfiltered and unedited—and the world was going to be better for it.
In 2001, legal scholar Cass Sunstein, later head of President Obama’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, explained that such an internet would benefit democracy:
[P]eople should be exposed to materials that they would not have chosen in advance. Unplanned, unanticipated encounters are central to democracy itself. Such encounters often involve topics and points of view that people have not sought out and perhaps find quite irritating. They are important partly to ensure against fragmentation and extremism, which are predictable outcomes of any situation in which like-minded people speak only with themselves.17
This idealistic vision of the internet never quite materialized. Instead, because of the business model explored in Part 1 (the internet extracts personal information and provides customized and free experiences in exchange), humankind ended up with something entirely different from what the optimists imagined. Today, we have an internet that largely decides for us what we want and like.
While this might sound like an overstatement, think about it. Sophisticated algorithms embedded in nearly every online experience track what we like and do, based on the information we give them. Not only does this include the personal information we willingly hand over, but also our searching, buying, and browsing habits. This is personal information, too. Now consider this: The internet is getting better and better at analyzing all the data it gobbles up. It knows what we like and want, sometimes better than we do. For example, did you happen to search for a new pair of shoes online? Bingo—now shoe advertisements are probably popping up on sites you visit. Did you like or share a left-leaning news article or two on Facebook? That explains why you’re getting more stories from the Huffington Post and Mother Jones on your feed instead of Fox News and The Weekly Standard.
Welcome to the world of “filter bubbles” and “echo chambers.” You’ve arrived at the really important part of personal information.
Help, I’m Trapped in a Filter Bubble!
In a compelling 2011 TED Talk, Eli Pariser, the former executive director of MoveOn.org, introduced the world to the term “filter bubble.” “Your filter bubble is your own personal, unique universe of information that you live in online. And what’s in your filter bubble depends on who you are, and it depends on what you do.”18 Additionally, Pariser warned, “if we don’t pay attention to it, it could be a real problem.”19
Google is particularly adept at this filter bubble business. Whenever you use the search engine, “there are fifty-seven signals that Google looks at— everything from what kind of computer you’re on to what kind of browser you’re using to where you’re located—that it uses to personally tailor your query results.”20
Google carefully analyzes your previous searches, plus a host of other data, to determine what it thinks you are looking for or what you might like, and voila! That’s what you get. You may never even know what Google decides to filter out for you. To illustrate this point, here’s an exercise I have my students try at home: Pick any word or phrase, though somewhat controversial topics works best (e.g., Iran, climate change, presidential). Next, ask five different family members or friends to Google the word or phrase on their own devices—mobile or desktop—and then to compare results. Likely, you will find each person’s results to be unique. They will be tailored and customized to the person who conducted the search (notice that the ads will be customized as well).
Why does this matter pertain to today’s youth? Because young people are supposed to be hard at work figuring out who they are, what they like, and what they believe in. This task is arguably more successfully accomplished when they are exposed to a broad spectrum of ideas and information. If Google, Facebook, Instagram, or other sites feed them a customized stream of information based on previous searches and personal information, to borrow the words of one of my students, “that’s just creepy.”
Pariser puts it in more thoughtful terms: “We need to make sure that they [internet services] also show us things that are uncomfortable or challenging or important. . . . We really need the internet to be that thing that we all dreamed of it being. We need it to connect us all together. We need it to introduce us to new ideas and new people and different perspectives. And it’s not going to do that if it leaves us all isolated in a web of one.”21
Avoiding Filter Bubbles
While Google and Facebook have drawn the most ire for data mining users’ information in exchange for customized experiences, this phenomenon happens all over the web. Netflix and YouTube queue up movies and videos they think we’ll like, based on our previous viewings. So if you just watched Wedding Crashers, it’s more likely Netflix will offer you The 40-Year-Old Virgin, rather than The Civil War. Amazon has customized its offerings for years, starting with books. Today, the world’s largest online retailer suggests all kinds of products based on whatever we bought or searched for last.
Granted, most young people aren’t using Facebook or shopping on Amazon (too much) yet, but they are watching Netflix and YouTube. They’re also using Instagram, which Facebook owns. A 2017 survey found that 76 percent of American teens, ages thirteen to seventeen, use this social network.22 Instagram employs many of the same successful customization techniques as Facebook. In 2016, Instagram announced, “To improve your experience, your feed will soon be ordered to show the moments we believe you will care about the most. The order of photos and videos in your feed will be based on the likelihood you’ll be interested in the content, your relationship with the person posting, and the timeliness of the post.”23
Unless you happened to be one of my students and were required to read this, you probably missed this announcement entirely. In short, Instagram decided to follow parent Facebook’s lead of reordering posts based on factors such as how recently the post was shared, interactions with the person who shared it, and whether or not the user found the post interesting. Based on this data, Instagram decides what it thinks a young user should see.
Judging from the grumbling I’ve heard among teens, they aren’t crazy about algorithms making decisions for them, just like they don’t relish Mom deciding what they should wear to school. But I’m hearing mostly from kids who are learning what to look out for. For each of these students, millions more have not learned why or how personal information is collected and how algorithms work. If they don’t know or understand the process, they certainly aren’t going to give a flying hoot about it.
Microsoft’s Bill Gates is one of a growing number of technologists who have expressed concerns about filter bubbles. He told a Quartz reporter that there is a solution: “Education is a counterbalance to filter bubbles . . . since it exposes people ‘to a common base of knowledge.’”24
For now, the opportunity the internet provides for everyone to be heard might outweigh the negative impact of filter bubbles, but it’s critical for kids to understand how they work and, more importantly, how to avoid falling prey to their influence. It might sound hyperbolic to claim that our very democracy is at stake, but consider the long-term consequences of ignoring this problem. What if kids end up consuming only a narrow, and predetermined, slice of the vast array of ideas, information, and worldviews the internet has to offer? That doesn’t sound like a wise use of this powerful and amazing resource to me.
The Paradoxical Privacy Practices of Teens
Andie is a fourteen-year-old girl I met one brisk February morning while visiting a K–12 school in Los Angeles. I was there to deliver lessons to their elementary- and middle-school students, but in the afternoon, I spent some time with their ninth graders. I planned to talk to them about online privacy, but these students weren’t at all interested in what not to post online. They’d “already heard that lecture,” they told me. What they really wanted to talk about was what they should be sharing online. They peppered me with questions:
• Do I need to have a LinkedIn account to get a job?
• I play club soccer, and I’d like college recruiters to see me play. Should I make a video? How long should it be? Where should I post it?
• In my spare time I tutor young kids. Would it be an invasion of their privacy to post their photos online?
• I’m performing in a lot of plays. Do you think I should videotape them for YouTube? Should I make my own channel?
I was impressed with their questions and at how eager they were to talk. The hour we had together wasn’t nearly enough.
When class ended, Andie lingered and introduced herself to me. A petite girl with a cascading mane of jet black hair, she was one of the only students who hadn’t uttered a word during the entire class. But once we started chatting, it didn’t take long for her bubbly personality to reveal itself. She even asked if she could show me her Instagram feed. When I said yes, she proudly revealed an account with 3,800 followers. Then she told me her story:
About a year ago my mom’s friend started a clothing line. She was just making T-shirts, swimsuits, and stuff for teens. Since her company was brand new, she couldn’t afford a model, so she asked my mom if I’d model for her. My mom asked me, and I agreed, and then I started putting some of the photos on my Instagram feed, and before long a bunch of kids from school found out about it and wanted to follow me.
Andie told me how much this boosted her self-esteem. Soon some of her new online friends became offline friends, and she said this is “helping me become less shy at school.”
“I think it’s good that you talk to kids about posting positive stuff online,” Andie said. “Usually adults just tell us social media is bad. Kids hear that and just keep posting the bad stuff anyway, but on private or fake accounts. Adults forget that not using social media, for us, is not an option.”
As I was driving home, I thought about what Andie said. What a delicate balancing act kids have to perform today between satisfying their need (and desire) to present themselves online while also preserving some privacy. It takes a lot of wisdom to get the balance just right.
To Share or Not to Share?
In 2015, a comprehensive study on the relationship between youth and online privacy revealed that teens “care more about social privacy than they do about privacy in the context of third-parties and big data/information privacy.”25 Researchers figured this is due to the fact that teens “fail to grasp what happens with that data after it has been posted.” And I figure this is due to lack of education. Paradoxically, according to this report, even though teens care deeply about their social privacy, they still share a lot of personal information online. Teens share real names (92 percent), photos of themselves (91 percent), interests (84 percent), birth date (82 percent), and school name and city/town where they live (71 percent) through social media platforms. At the same time, they go to great lengths to keep this information private from certain audiences by using a combination of nontechnical measures (creating fake identities and accounts) as well as technical ones (using privacy settings). Teens also employ other creative methods to maintain privacy online, particularly to avoid parental surveillance, like moving to new sites or encoding hidden meaning into their posts by using cultural references, slang, and emojis.
Teen privacy practices are a study in contradictions. On one hand it looks like they’re indiscriminately sharing waaaay too much information, while on the other hand they seem to be going to great lengths to limit what gets seen, using methods that completely perplex adult onlookers. But as with every new digital activity, one’s perspective depends on which generation you’re viewing it from.
A perfect example of this perspective problem is the “selfie.” In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past ten years, a selfie is a self-portrait one takes with a phone. While adults commonly worry that the numerous selfies kids take and post reveal TMI (too much information), both literally and figuratively, kids don’t see them that way at all. For most cell phone-wielding kids, selfies are a normal part of their lives. And why shouldn’t they be? Self-image sharing is nothing new. It used to be considered high art. Rembrandt did it, as did Claude Monet, and Vincent van Gogh, too (he painted more than thirty self-portraits between 1886–1889). Mexican painter Frida Kahlo created fifty-five self-portraits in her lifetime, often documenting the personal tragedies she endured. When asked why she painted so many pictures of herself, she answered, “Because I am the subject I know best.”26
Technology has merely simplified the age-old act of self-disclosure. “It used to be that portraits were only available to people that were wealthy enough to hire Leonardo da Vinci to paint their picture or to hire a portrait photographer,” says Dr. Pamela Rutledge. “But with the cell phone and the ability to upload to Facebook or Instagram at no cost, it has totally democratized portraiture.”27
I’d wager that if someone like van Gogh were alive today, he’d be snapping selfies, particularly if reincarnated as a teenager smack in the middle of the task of figuring out who he is and how to present that self to the world. What better way to document this process than by taking and sharing self-images?
“With selfie-taking, it puts people in charge of their own self-image,” says Rutledge. “I think selfies play a big role in letting people document their growth and their progress. And explore identities. And think about themselves. So, I think that part of it is very positive.”28
Nevertheless, most parents worry, and rightfully so, that self-images posted online might reveal too much personal information that could damage their children’s digital reputations or put them in harm’s way, while kids don’t worry about this at all. And that is my point.
When viewed through the rose-colored lens of youth, digital activities seem full of possibility and promise. Seldom do they look as rosy to parents. This applies to all the topics we’ve covered thus far—reputation, screen time, relationships, and privacy. Each of these—the four cornerstones of a sturdy structure that will keep your children safely protected in their digital world—are complex and sometimes confusing. Kids need conversation and education surrounding each one.
They need us to look at the digital world through their lens once in a while, too!
CYBER CIVICS MOMENTS
Virtual Stranger Danger
Children everywhere are taught about real world “stranger danger,” but what about virtual stranger danger? They will come into contact with many, many more strangers online than they ever will in real life. Even though students I’ve met represent a small sampling of the world at large, you would not believe how many have told me they have been asked for personal information from a stranger online. Even more disconcerting is how many say they know kids who have willingly provided such information to strangers.
The moment you hand your children a connected device, it is vital to share these hard, fast rules regarding personal information. Tape these to your refrigerator, your laptop, desktop computer, or your kids’ foreheads. Whatever it takes.
1. Tell your children they should never, ever share the following information (their own or another’s) with a stranger online without your express consent:
• Full name
• Physical address
• Email address
• Phone number
• School name
• Current location
• Clues to future locations
• Password
• Photos
As your children get older, they will start using their own best judgment about if and when it is safe to share any of the above. Until then, make sure they understand and agree to your rules.
2. Tell your children they should never, ever engage with strangers online. Explain that, on the internet, it’s Halloween every day. People are hiding their identities behind masks otherwise known as their screens. While most of these people are nice, some may not be. As your children get older, they will start using their own best judgment as to if and when to engage with online strangers, but until then make sure they follow your rules.
3. Tell your children they should never, ever meet someone in real life that they have first met online. It may take longer for your children to develop the good judgment they’ll need to decide when it is okay to bend this rule, so keep open communication about their friendships, online and offline.
Password Perfect
Passwords are our first line of defense to protect our personal information online. Even though there are a lot of online programs that will make and remember passwords for them, teaching children how to make and remember their own is important. It underscores how critical it is to have safe and strong passwords and can also be a lot of fun.
1. Teach your children these seven rules for making a great password. A great password should:
• Be at least eight characters in length.
• Include a combination of lower and uppercase letters, symbols, and numbers.
• Never include personal information (like a birth date or Social Security number).
• Never include the name of family members, friends, or pets.
• Never include sequences, such as abcde or 12345.
• Never include a dictionary word (unless a letter has been changed into a symbol).
• Be changed regularly—at least every six months.
2. Explain the term “mnemonic” to your children. Simply put, a mnemonic is a memory device that aids in the retention of information.
3. Ask your children to think of their favorite celebrity, athlete, musician, or historical figure (make sure they do not tell you who it is). This will be their mnemonic.
4. Teach your children how to use a mnemonic to make a great password. Here’s an example: Tell them your mnemonic is Taylor Swift (work with me here) and that your favorite song of hers is “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.” Use the first letter of each word of this song title to begin your password (WANEGBT). Next, convert this into a mix of upper and lowercase letters (WaNeGbT). Because you need to add a number or symbol, change the last word, “together,” to “2gether” (WaNeGb2). Finally, since you need to add one more character to make your password the right length and Swift seemed emphatic about never ever getting back together, add an exclamation point at the end. Here is your password: WaNeGb2!
5. Have your children follow your example, creating their own great password. When they finish, try to guess who their mnemonics are based on the passwords they’ve made. Make another password yourself, and have them try to guess yours, or their siblings’ or friends’ mnemonics. I have done this in the classroom numerous times and am always amazed at how good kids are at this game. Plus, they will never ever forget how to make and remember great passwords!
Pitch Me!
Credit for this activity goes to one of my students, who told me that if she wants to download an app, her dad makes her first research it thoroughly. Then she has to make a PowerPoint presentation and use it to pitch him on the app. “Brilliant!” I thought. I loved this idea so much, I’ve made it easy for you to do it at home.
1. So, your children (who are at least thirteen years of age) want to download Snapchat. Invite them to research the app first. This is easy to do; Snapchat’s privacy policy and terms of service are accessible via a Google search.
2. Have your children create a presentation for you about the app. They don’t have to use Microsoft PowerPoint for this task. This is a wonderful opportunity for them to practice using one of the many free presentation tools available online. One of my favorites is Prezi. Tell your children to use the following questions as a guide when they create their presentation:
• What is the minimum user age for the app?
• What personal information will the app ask for?
• What will you receive in exchange for the personal information you provide?
• Will you share user content on this app? If so, who will own that content?
• Will the app share your information with third parties? If so, how?
• Will it track your location?
• What conduct does the app expect from users? Is there a way to report bad behavior?
• Will there be ads on the app? How else might the app be monetized?
• What kind of privacy settings does the app offer?
If this seems like too much work for your teens, please consider the amount of work they’ll be putting into that app in the coming years. It takes time and effort to snap, curate, and post photos. Tagging, commenting, liking, and reading what others post takes time, too. If your teens don’t have time to research this app, then they surely don’t have time to use it!
My Self, My Selfie
If a picture is worth a thousand words, what’s a selfie worth? That’s the million-dollar question today, as young people indiscriminately share tons of information about themselves through the selfies they take and share. Explore this phenomenon with your children and come to a shared understanding of what personal information is or is not okay to share online.
1. Ask your children to tell you what a selfie is. They will probably know that this is “a photo one has taken of oneself,” but ask them: What do you think the purpose of a selfie is? How often do you take and post pictures of yourself? Why do you think selfies have become so popular? Tell your children that, in 2012, Time named “selfie” one of the top ten buzzwords of the year, and that it was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2013.29 They might be impressed about how much you know!
2. Ask your children if they have ever judged someone they didn’t know by the person’s selfie. Ask for examples.
3. Tell your children that, while taking selfies can be a lot of fun, it’s important to think about what these images convey to others. Discuss what personal information they may be sharing. (Do their selfies tell others where they are? Where they live? Or that no one is at home?) How they share their selfies and who they share them with are important discussion topics.
4. Explain that long before there were selfies, famous artists like van Gogh and Rembrandt, among others, shared their self-imagery through self-portraits.
5. Next is the fun part. Google some of these artists and view their self-portraits. Ask your children what they think these artists were trying to convey. Find out what they can ascertain about the artist by looking at the pictures you find.
6. Consider visiting your local art museum or gallery to do the above. It might inspire your children to see a museum or gallery you’ve visited before in a whole new light!