Articles Archive - 2009

Solving the Privacy Dilemma: How parents and teachers can help youth deal with privacy and marketing issues online

Imagine receiving a resume with the following entries: "2002-2006: University. Got drunk and was photographed in various states of undress" and "2007-2008: First job. Called in sick to skip work, went to a party instead." Or picture a child going into a fast-food restaurant and giving the cashier her name, address, phone number and snack preferences, along with the same information on all her friends. As outlandish as these two scenarios may seem, each is only a slight exaggeration of the kinds of disclosures young people regularly make online – and though they may appear to be miles apart, these scenarios both stem from the same bad habits.

As the Internet becomes more and more essential to our home and work lives, it is becoming evident that young people need to acquire skills and attitudes that were not even imagined in past generations. Chief among these skills is privacy management – the ability to control what information about you is online, and to whom it is available. The paradox of the Internet is that while a large part of its appeal is the ability to be anonymous, people use it to draw attention to themselves. That same sense of anonymity can also blind people to the ways in which the Internet can be used to gather information about you – methods that traditional media can only envy.

Parents and educators are starting to become aware of the privacy issues facing teenagers and young adults as they develop and experiment with their online identities. What many may not realize, however, is that the habits that lead young people into making bad judgments on Facebook and YouTube actually begin much earlier – and that there is an entire industry devoted to making children accustomed to giving away personal information.

Privacy and marketing issues in children’s online spaces

For young people the Internet is an overwhelmingly commercial environment. Media Awareness Network’s (MNet) 2005 study Young Canadians in a Wired World showed that ninety-five per cent of young Internet users' favourite sites contain commercial content, but children often failed to register the nature of these sites: two-thirds of those students who played advergames, in which advertising material is integrated into online games, said they saw them as "just games," not ads.

Exposure to this online world begins at an early age – as young as age two in some cases, according to the study Like Taking Candy From a Baby: How Young Children Interact with Online Environments, by Dr. Warren Buckleitner (2008) – and children are quickly immersed in a constant bath of commercials and branded images. Buckleitner's study found that nearly all children's sites surveyed used a variety of techniques to promote brand recognition, some subtle (the Webkinz logo placed on the pin-clearing mechanism in a bowling game), some more overt (the Rescue Pets logo on the back of every single card in an online version of "Concentration"). It's possible that this early and intensive exposure to branded material can make children, even older children, unable to recognize the commercial nature of the sites they visit. Research has shown that children under six simply don't understand the idea of advertising, and by the time they have developed the capability to recognize marketing messages they will already be accustomed to a world made up of mascots and logos.

The ability to immerse children in advertising content is only one of the benefits of the Internet for marketers. Another is its interactive quality, which makes youth engage with online advertising in a way not found in traditional media. A 2008 study by Mediamark Research and Intelligence showed that nearly half of children ages 6 to 11 had intentionally navigated to a Web site referred to in a commercial in another medium; in other words, the traditional 30-second spot is now becoming a gateway to the much more prolonged, immersive, interactive commercials found online.

The interactive quality of the Internet does more than draw and hold children's attention, though: it also makes it possible for children to voluntarily participate in market research, providing advertisers with data they would have paid top dollar to get in the past. While nearly all commercial sites aimed at kids contain some free content, in most cases it is necessary to either pay or register to access the best material – and registering almost always means giving up demographic information marketers use to focus and target their ads.

In addition to registrations, these sites use a variety of other techniques to get children to give personal information. Users of popular sites like Neopets¸ for instance, are urged to complete surveys which are nearly always designed to gather consumer research data, such as tastes in candy or breakfast cereal preferences. In exchange for completing the surveys, users are given "Neopoints" which they can use to purchase items within the game. This early training in consumerism is found in nearly all children's Web sites, and accustoms children from an early age to the idea of giving up one's privacy in exchange for perks and prizes.

The social networking generation: trading privacy for attention

Teenagers have always been driven to test the rules, and on a cultural level we enter adolescence earlier and leave it later than ever before. What's different is that the Internet, unlike other mass media, is interactive: users not only receive messages but can broadcast them as well. Unlike the telephone, the only other similar two-way medium, the number of recipients can approach infinity. This is, of course, the appeal of the Internet, which leads to what we might call the privacy dilemma: the more fully we participate in Internet life, the more of our privacy we risk giving away.

By adolescence, attention is the most valuable commodity, and teenagers apply to sites like Facebook the lessons they learned in Neopets. The report Social Networking: A quantitative and qualitative research report into attitudes, behaviours and use, by the Office of Communications of the United Kingdom (2008), showed that forty-one per cent of children ages 8 to 17 with visible profiles on social networking sites included personally identifying information such as their e-mail address, phone number or home address.

More worrying than the habit of making private information public, though, are behaviours that consciously trade privacy for attention: posting photos, videos or messages with the potential to be embarrassing, humiliating or even illegal. The trend of posting nude or suggestive photos has led to several high-profile cases in which young people have been charged with distributing child pornography for e-mailing pictures of their girlfriends, boyfriends or themselves. More common, though, is simple humiliation when the pictures fall into the wrong hands. In fact, research by Dr. Faye Mishna of the University of Toronto has shown that making public material that was meant to be private is one of the most common forms of cyber bullying, and as cell phone cameras proliferate it seems likely that this kind of harassment will become more and more common.

Because of the persistence of online material – anything posted on the Internet can be copied and distributed, even if you delete your original – the potential for embarrassment can be long-lived. Sometimes the consequences are severe: a student at Millersville University in Pennsylvania was denied her teaching degree due to an online photo of her titled "Drunken Pirate," which was seen as promoting drinking. Perhaps the most telling example, in terms of the cavalier approach displayed towards privacy, is the case of an intern at Anglo Irish Bank, who e-mailed his supervisor to say he would have to miss work due to "something [that] came up at home" – only to later post a picture of himself on his Facebook page, dressed as a fairy at a costume party on the day in question.

Teaching privacy management

The thread running through these different kinds of online privacy issues – whether it's a six-year-old giving out her name, age and favourite ice cream flavour on a Neopets survey, a thirteen-year-old posting suggestive pictures of herself on her MySpace page, or a young adult assuming no one will ever connect his absence from work with the activities he Twitters about – is the lack of privacy management skills.

Teachers and parents are generally no more aware than young people of the many risks to privacy online or the tactics and tools that can be used to protect it. Moreover, trying to teach young people (especially tweens and teens) privacy management skills can be an uphill battle. By adolescence, as we’ve seen, kids are much more interested in attracting attention than protecting their privacy. And when they do think about privacy, it is not in terms of protecting their information from their friends, online contacts, or possible future employers; rather, they want protection from their parents and teachers.

Critical thinking skills are the key in dealing with all aspects of the Internet, from researching school papers to dealing with online relationships, and they are the foundation of privacy management. While it may be futile to insist that young people not make any personal information public on the Internet, we can teach them to question the motives of people and corporations who ask for it, and to understand how their own actions may compromise their privacy.

To help educators teach young people to think critically about these issues, MNet, with support from the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC), has developed a number of privacy management resources. The professional development workshop Kids for Sale, part of MNet’s comprehensive Web Awareness Workshop Series, familiarizes teachers with the issues of online privacy and marketing, and provides tips and resources for the classroom. The resources also include a two-lesson series, available for free download from both the OPC and MNet Web sites, that teaches students in Grades 7 to 12 how to balance privacy with maintaining an online life.

Once kids are sensitized to privacy issues, we can make them aware of the tools that exist to protect their privacy. Research has shown, for instance, that users of social networking sites – kids and adults alike – rarely adjust the privacy settings on their profiles, and on most sites the default is the lowest level of protection. Changing just a few of these settings can limit the potential viewers of a profile tremendously, while still allowing access to the user's actual friends. (A handout on using privacy settings in Facebook is included in the MNet privacy lesson series.)

Children also need to be made aware of the commercial nature of many Web sites. The MNet Web site has resources for children as young as five that teach them to recognize marketing ploys and data mining techniques, including Co-Co's AdverSmarts: An Interactive Unit on Food Marketing on the Web which demonstrates how commercial Web sites aimed at kids integrate marketing messages with entertainment content.

The role of the parent is perhaps the most important one: it's essential that parents be aware and take part in their children's online life. Rather than simply accepting the consumerist ethos of sites like Neopets, with their stress on the relentless acquisition of more “stuff”, parents can take the opportunity to question the messages kids are receiving on these sites. As children get older, parents can use these conversations to encourage their children to develop critical thinking skills, teaching them that many seemingly free offers – such as the promise of "Neopoints" in exchange for filling out a survey – come at a cost to their privacy.

As well, there are kids' sites with little or no commercial content, and they not only raise fewer privacy issues but also tend to be more positive experiences overall. According to the Buckleitner study, the non-commercial Sesame Street and PBSKids Web sites had the most educational content, while Club Penguin, an advertising-free site which requires a subscription to access the full content, offered the best overall experience.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, household rules do have an effect on Internet use, even with teens. Young Canadians in a Wired World found that having a rule against giving out your real name and address online reduced the likelihood of that behaviour by as much as twenty-five per cent, and the MediaMark study Nearly One-Half of Kids Report Being Drawn to Websites by TV or Print Advertisements found a strong association between kids visiting Web sites mentioned in ads and an absence of household rules on Internet use.

In addition to education, there are industry responses that should be encouraged by parents and other concerned citizens. Under both Canadian and American law businesses have limits on what information they may collect online (in the U.S. there are additional limits on what can be collected from children), and most sites post a privacy policy which outlines exactly what information is collected and what will be done with it. Unfortunately, these policies are typically written in extremely difficult language, even on sites aimed at children; privacy policies found on the fifty sites most popular among Canadian youth had, on average, language at a university level of reading comprehension. The report Broken Doors: Strategies for Drafting Privacy Policies Kids Can Understand, published by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner in 2007, presents 14 guidelines for making privacy policies more understandable – but the industry needs to be encouraged to make these changes.

There are also a number of industry guidelines that address online privacy, and while they are only voluntary it's possible to contact sites your children use and make sure they follow them. The Canadian Marketing Association's Code of Ethics for Marketing to Children, for instance, forbids collecting any data at all from children under 13 without consent from a parent or guardian. MNet’s Kids for Sale workshop provides a checklist to help identify sites that follow best practices in their registration and data collection policies.

Trying to teach kids about privacy can often seem like rowing a boat upstream, and there are powerful forces in your way, including teenagers' poor judgment and desire for attention and an entire industry devoted to training young people to adopt bad privacy habits. It's not an impossible task, though, and by teaching privacy management skills to children as soon as they start to use the Internet we can help them to make wise and safe online decisions that will not come back to haunt them.

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Media Awareness Network (MNet) is a Canadian not-for-profit centre of expertise in media literacy. Its vision is to ensure children and youth possess the necessary critical thinking skills and tools to understand and actively engage with media. MNet's programs are funded by its public and private sector sponsors and partners, who include: CTVglobemedia • Canwest • TELUS • Canadian Internet Registration Authority • CTV • National Film Board of Canada • Government of Canada.

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