Traditional online safety technologies often overly restrict teens and invade their privacy, while parents often lack knowledge regarding their digital privacy. As such, prior researchers have called for more collaborative approaches on adolescent online safety and networked privacy. In this paper, we propose family-centered approaches to foster parent-teen collaboration in ensuring their mobile privacy and online safety while respecting individual privacy, to enhance open discussion and teens' self-regulation. However, challenges such as power imbalances and conflicts with family values arise when implementing such approaches, making parent-teen collaboration difficult. Therefore, attending the family-centered design workshop provided an invaluable opportunity for us to discuss these challenges and identify best research practices for the future of collaborative online safety and privacy within families.
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Privacy Challenges for Adolescents as a Vulnerable Population
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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- Award ID(s):
- 1827700
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10525795
- Publisher / Repository:
- Networked Privacy Workshop of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Traditional online safety technologies often overly restrict teens and invade their privacy, while parents often lack knowledge regarding their digital privacy. As such, prior researchers have called for more collaborative approaches on adolescent online safety and networked privacy. In this paper, we propose family-centered approaches to foster parent-teen collaboration in ensuring their mobile privacy and online safety while respecting individual privacy, to enhance open discussion and teens' self-regulation. However, challenges such as power imbalances and conflicts with family values arise when implementing such approaches, making parent-teen collaboration difficult. Therefore, attending the family-centered design workshop provided an invaluable opportunity for us to discuss these challenges and identify best research practices for the future of collaborative online safety and privacy within families.more » « less
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As part of a Youth Advisory Board of teens (YAB), a longitudinal and interactive program to engage with teens for adolescent online safety research, we used an Asynchronous Remote Community (ARC) method with seven teens to explore their social media usage and perspectives on privacy on social media. There was a spectrum of privacy levels in our teen participants’ preferred social media platforms and preferences varied depending on their user goals such as content viewing and socializing. They recognized privacy risks they could encounter on social media, hence, actively used privacy features afforded by platforms to stay safe while meeting their goals. In addition, our teen participants designed solutions that can aid users to exercise more granular control over determining what information on their accounts is to be shared with which groups of users. Our findings highlight the need to ensure researchers and social media developers work with teens to provide teen-centric solutions for safer experiences on social media.more » « less
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Adolescent online safety research has largely focused on designing interventions for teens, with few evaluations that provide effective online safety solutions. It is challenging to evaluate such solutions without simulating an environment that mimics teens online risks. To overcome this gap, we conducted focus groups with 14 teens to co-design realistic online risk scenarios and their associated user personas, which can be implemented for an ecologically valid evaluation of interventions. We found that teens considered the characteristics of the risky user to be important and designed personas to have traits that align with the risk type, were more believable and authentic, and attracted teens through materialistic content. Teens also redesigned the risky scenarios to be subtle in information breaching, harsher in cyberbullying, and convincing in tricking the teen. Overall, this work provides an in-depth understanding of the types of bad actors and risky scenarios teens design for realistic research experimentation.more » « less
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null (Ed.)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.more » « less
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
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