• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

NetFamilyNews.org

Kid tech intel for everybody

Show Search
Hide Search
  • Home
  • Youth
  • Parenting
  • Literacy
  • Safety
  • Policy
  • Research
  • About NetFamilyNews.org
    • Supporters
    • Anne Collier’s Bio
    • Copyright
    • Privacy

‘State of the Union’ & the student part of student privacy protection

January 22, 2015 By Admin Leave a Comment

There’s a lot of confusion in the air about student data privacy, and some widely quoted words about it from President Obama in his address Tuesday night didn’t help (but I suspect his speechwriters were just looking for a spot to put a high-priority topic into “a simple, dramatic message about economic fairness,” as the New York Times put it:

(Creative Commons licensed)
(Creative Commons licensed)

“No foreign nation, no hacker should be able to shut down our networks, steal our trade secrets or invade the privacy of American families, especially our kids.”

Today’s privacy protection mashup

Where kids’ data is concerned, the problem is not foreign nations or hackers, it’s a blend of elements much closer to the kids and their devices, as close as the kids themselves, their peers, their devices, the providers of the devices and the software on them and the authorities in their lives (at home and school). So the solution is a mashup too. Not even “only” a mashup of laws and privacy settings (on devices, from social media companies, in operating systems or in the apps that run on them). It’s not just distributed across those non-human parts of the privacy equation; it’s distributed among the people who are party to a social experience in a digital space.

Because of the social nature of media, privacy is personal and social and fluid. It’s shared by all parties to that social situation. It needs to be optimized not just protected – by all the moving parts – especially by the user at the center of those concentric circles of privacy protection: in this case, your kid.

Protection from the inside out

How can we help our kids do their part, consciously and skillfully, in the optimization of their own privacy? First of all, we can’t continue to see or represent them as passive beneficiaries of others’ actions to protect their privacy. Part of protecting them is respectful treatment of youth as active participants in today’s participatory privacy equation – as is developmentally appropriate, of course.

Certainly privacy law plays a role, if written with an understanding of social media and how kids use it, but laws can’t equip kids or make parents equip kids, especially since parents can’t know every digital move a kid makes. Privacy settings in services and devices can help, but not if the user doesn’t understand their value or know how to calibrate them to his/her own experience, and not as long as peers find workarounds.

Privacy optimized for the personal, social, fluid nature of digital activity works from the inside-out, out from the software in a kid’s head, through the device and its software, and into digitally based social activity. Do you see why literacy – digital, social and media literacy – has never in human history been more needed? Nothing can equip our children to protect themselves, each other, their data and their communities, moment by moment, more effectively than the literacies of the digital age.

Help from smart laws & media providers

The White House certainly understands the collaborative nature of privacy optimization. Before the State of the Union address, it detailed both government and private-sector efforts in the area of student privacy. And in the first presidential appearance at the Federal Trade Commission since Franklin Roosevelt’s, Mr. Obama noted that “75 companies across the country have signed on to a Student Privacy Pledge. And among other things, they’re committing not to sell student information or use educational technologies to engage in targeted advertising to students.” [It was 75 companies as of last week; this week the Wall Street Journal reported Google joined the pledge, saying it hadn’t before because of having already made the commitment to its customers.]

And Obama proposed the Student Digital Privacy Act. “We’re saying that data collected on students in the classroom should only be used for educational purposes – to teach our children, not to market to our children,” the President said. “We want to prevent companies from selling student data to third parties for purposes other than education. We want to prevent any kind of profiling that outs certain students at a disadvantage as they go through school.”

The crucial missing piece

These initiatives will help protect kids, but they’re not enough. There’s a missing piece at the center of the privacy protection puzzle, the digital age literacies, a big piece because it has three parts. The social one seems to challenge policymakers most. As a society, we haven’t yet made the connection between social media and social literacy (or social-emotional skills). We’ve begun to consider its importance to bullying prevention, we understand that positive school climates support learning, we get that social-emotional learning enhances social competency and academic performance, we see cyberbullying as a form of bullying, and – based on the work of the Berkman Center Internet safety task force of 2008 – we understand that cyberbullying is the most common online risk for youth. We’ve begun to put all that together, but educators tell me that, even while schools struggle with bullying in social media, they see social literacy as a luxury, peripheral or just unrelated to “technology” – or just off the radar screen. But just think about it for a moment: How is it not intuitive that social literacy helps things go well in social media?

When are we going to make that connection at home, school, corporate and government levels of policymaking? Social, media and digital literacy are not just integral but crucial to child protection online and offline in this networked world. Not just literacy for children, but digital, media and social literacy in parents, educators, law enforcement, healthcare workers, policymakers and everyone else in children’s lives is crucial too, because we know how much children learn by the example we set. It’s not too late for us adults to start now; recognition of the need alone will get us there much faster. But let’s at least start consciously working toward filling in the all-important missing piece of children’s online privacy protection.

Related links

  • “Cybersecurity and Privacy in State of the Union Address” in the National Law Review
  • “Balancing external with internal Internet safety ‘tools'” (my Dec. 2013)
  • A research basis for focusing on literacy instruction for safety of ourselves and our data: “Challenging ‘Internet safety’ as a subject to be taught” – digital, media and social literacy as the Primary, universal level of online/offline risk prevention (of three “levels of prevention”), pre-K through 12, wherever appropriate in the core curriculum, especially in digital tools and environments used in the classroom [the Secondary and Tertiary levels of Net-related risk prevention would be targeted and situational prevention ed when incidents occur (Secondary) and customized prevention and intervention for youth with established patterns of online/offline risk in their lives]
  • The National Law Review on cybersecurity and privacy in the State of the Union address
  • My post last July: “Big data, big parents: Student privacy developments”
  • About last year’s work at the White House that led to this month’s announcements: “Kids” privacy and a White House report on big data”
  • “Flawed early laws of our new media environment” (Dec. 2013)
  • Full text of the Presidents State of the Union address at Time.com
Share Button

Filed Under: Law & Policy, Literacy & Citizenship, Parenting, Privacy Tagged With: consumer privacy, cybersecurity, data privacy, digital literacy, Google, Internet safety, legislation, media literacy, online privacy, pledge, President Obama, SEL, social literacy, student privacy, White House

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Primary Sidebar

NFN in your in-box:

Anne Collier


Bio and my...
2016 TEDx Talk on
the heart of digital citizenship

Subscribe to my
RSS feed
Follow me on Twitter or even better:
NEW: Follow me on MASTODON!
Friend me on Facebook
See me on YouTube

IMPORTANT RESOURCES

Our (DIGITAL) PARENTING BASICS: Safety + Social
NAMLE, the National Association for Media Literacy Education
CASEL.org & the 5 core social-emotional competencies of SEL
Center for Democracy & Technology
Center for Innovative Public Health Research
Childnet International
Committee for Children
Congressional Internet Caucus Academy
ConnectSafely.org
Control Shift: a pivotal book for Internet safety
Crimes Against Children Research Center
Crisis Textline
Cyber Civil Rights Initiative's Revenge Porn Crisis Line
Cyberwise.org
danah boyd's blog and book about networked youth
Disconnected, Carrie James's book on digital ethics
FOSI.org's Good Digital Parenting
The research of Global Kids Online
The Good Project at Harvard's School of Education
If you watch nothing else: "Parenting in a Digital Age" TED Talk by Prof. Sonia Livingstone
The International Bullying Prevention Association
Let Grow Foundation
Making Caring Common
Raising Digital Natives, author Devorah Heitner's site
Renee Hobbs at the Media Education Lab
MediaSmarts.ca
The New Media Literacies
Report of the Aspen Task Force on Learning & the Internet and our guide to Creating Trusted Learning Environments
The Ruler Approach to social-emotional learning (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence)
Sources of Strength
"Young & Online: Perspectives on life in a digital age" from young people in 26 countries (via UNICEF)
"Youth Safety on a Living Internet": 2010 report of the Online Safety & Technology Working Group (and my post about it)

Categories

Recent Posts

  • A solution for ‘awful but lawful’
  • New global service for getting nudes off the Internet
  • Then there’s the flip side of ChatGPT
  • For SID 2023: What youth want ‘online safety’ to teach
  • ChatGPT for media literacy training
  • Future safety: Content moderators and digital grassroots justice
  • Mental health 2023, Part 1: Youth on algorithms
  • Where did my Twitter go? And other end-of-2022 notes

Footer

Welcome to NetFamilyNews!

Founded as a nonprofit public service in 1999, NetFamilyNews quickly became the “community newspaper” of a vital interest community of subscribers in more than 50 countries. Site and newsletter became a blog in the early 2000s. Nowadays, you can subscribe in the box to the right to receive articles in your in-box as they're posted – or look for tweets, posts on our Facebook page, and key commentaries from Anne on her page at Medium.com. She welcomes your comments, follows and shares!

Categories

  • Home
  • Youth
  • Parenting
  • Literacy
  • Safety
  • Policy
  • Research

ABOUT

  • About NFN
  • Supporters
  • Anne Collier’s Bio
  • Copyright
  • Privacy

Search

Subscribe



THANKS TO NETFAMILYNEWS.ORG's SUPPORTER HOMESCHOOL CURRICULUM.
Copyright © 2023 ANNE COLLIER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.