A team of UMD iSchool researchers aim to strengthen children's privacy literacy.
University of Maryland iSchool Associate Professors Jessica Vitak, Tamara Clegg, Mega Subramaniam, and PhD student Priya Kumar, along with University of Chicago Assistant Professor Marshini Chetty, have published the article, “Strengthening Children’s Privacy Literacy through Contextual Integrity.”
Through their research, they aimed to develop a new approach to privacy literacy for children. They interviewed 30 families including 40 children to analyze children’s perspective on password management in the contexts of family life, friendship, and education. In the article, the researchers demonstrate their findings on how children’s perception of the appropriateness of disclosing a password varied across different contexts.
They argue that “equipping children to make privacy-related decisions serves them better than instructing them to follow privacy-related rules.”