Future online safety technologies should consider the privacy needs of adolescents (ages 13-17) and support their ability to self-regulate their online behaviors and navigate online risks. To do this, adolescent online safety researchers and practitioners must shift towards solutions that are more teen-centric by designing privacy-preserving online safety solutions for teens. In this paper, we discuss privacy challenges we have encountered in conducting adolescent online safety research. We discuss privacy concerns of teens in regard to sharing their private social media data with researchers and potentially taking part in a user study where they share some of this information with their parents. Our research emphasizes a need for more privacy-preserving interventions for teens.
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Conducting Risky Research with Teens: Co-designing for the Ethical Treatment and Protection of Adolescents
The methods in which we study the online experiences of adolescents should be evidence-based and informed by youth. This is especially true when studying sensitive topics, such as the online risk behaviors of minors. We directly engaged 20 adolescents (ages 12-18) in the co-design of two different research methodologies (i.e., diary studies and analyzing social media trace data) for conducting adolescent online safety research. We also interviewed 13 of their parents to understand their perspectives. Overall, teens wanted to share their personal experiences and benefit society, while parents wanted researchers to tackle a topic that they felt was a prevalent problem for teens. Yet, they both had significant concerns regarding data privacy of the sensitive disclosures made by teens during such studies. Teens' feared getting in trouble. Participants emphasized the importance of developing a trusting relationship with the researcher to overcome these concerns. Participants also saw the potential for using the research study as a tool for risk-reporting and mitigation, where researchers could act as liaisons between the teens and other parties (e.g., counselors, law enforcement, parents) to share pertinent risk details and facilitate resources or even help teens directly by giving them strategies for mitigating online risks they encountered during the study. Our research delves into important ethical considerations for conducting risk-focused research with adolescents and uncovers the critical need for designing risk-based research for youth protection. We provide researchers with heuristic guidelines for conducting ethical research with vulnerable populations (i.e., adolescents) and keeping participants safe while doing so.
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- PAR ID:
- 10213816
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
- Volume:
- 4
- Issue:
- CSCW3
- ISSN:
- 2573-0142
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 46
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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