Children’s data and privacy online: Growing up in a digital age. Research findings.

• Children are encountering continual technological innovation which brings new and complex risks and opportunities. • In an age of datafication, privacy is being reconfigured, with data protection regulation increasingly important in protecting privacy. • Existing research demonstrates that children develop their privacy-related awareness and desire for privacy as they grow older, especially in relation to institutional and commercial contexts for privacy. • Children care about their privacy online, and they want to be able to decide what information is shared and with whom. • Children engage in a wide range of strategies to keep their devices, online profiles and personal information safe from unwanted interference. • Children tend to think of privacy online in terms of e-safety, struggling to grasp the relation between privacy and data – hence only e-safety risks seem truly real. • It matters that children first learn about interpersonal privacy - extending interpersonal assumptions to institutional and commercial contexts leads to misunderstandings. • Children focus on data they know they give, much more than data that is taken or inferred – and they think all of it is ‘none of their business’. • Terminology misleads – they must give ‘consent’; businesses want their personal data; what’s deleted isn’t gone; private means friends can’t see but others can. • Children’s media literacy – especially their critical knowledge of the data ecology - plays an important part in how they can understand, manage and safeguard their privacy. • Understanding grows with experience, but there’s no ‘magic’ age of capacity. • Parents are confused and concerned, and like teachers, they want higher-level solutions; they can’t deal with online data and privacy alone.

See section 8