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  • "We picked community over privacy": Privacy and Security Concerns Emerging from Remote Learning Sociotechnical Infrastructure During COVID-19
Title: "We picked community over privacy": Privacy and Security Concerns Emerging from Remote Learning Sociotechnical Infrastructure During COVID-19
With the rapid shift to remote learning in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, parents, teachers, and students had to quickly adapt to what scholars have called emergency remote learning (ERL). This transition required increased reliance on digital tools, exacerbating privacy and security threats associated with expanded data collection and new vulnerabilities. In this study, we adopt a sociotechnical and infrastructural perspective to understand how these threats emerged through breakdowns and tensions in elementary school ERL. Through interviews with 29 US-based teachers and parents of elementary school students (grades PreK-6), we identify two core findings related to privacy and security. First, we detail three breakdowns in the ERL sociotechnical infrastructure: (1) reduced attention to privacy and security issues as parents and teachers cobbled together a patchwork of tools needed to make ERL work; (2) privacy and security risks that emerged from ambiguous and shifting school policies; and (3) the failure to adapt standard authentication mechanisms (e.g., passwords) to be usable by young children. Second, we identify tensions between parents' and teachers' desire to help children advance in their education and their desire for children's privacy and security in ERL, as well as tensions resulting from the collapse of home and school contexts. These findings collectively suggest that ERL exacerbated existing--and created new--privacy and security challenges for young students, and we argue these challenges will carry beyond the pandemic due to the increasing use of technology to supplement traditional education. In light of these findings, we recommend researchers and educators use a framework of care to develop social and technical approaches to improving remote learning in order to protect children's privacy and security.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1951688
PAR ID:
10510813
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ; ; ;
Publisher / Repository:
ACM Digital Library
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
Volume:
7
Issue:
CSCW2
ISSN:
2573-0142
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1 to 29
Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
CSCW emergency remote learning education children teachers privacy security sociotechnical infrastructure science and technology studies STS COVID-19
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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