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Many children are growing up in a “digital-by-default” world, where technologies mediate many of their interactions. There is emerging consensus that those who design technology must support children’s privacy and security. However, privacy and security are complex concepts that are challenging to design for, and centering the interests of children is similarly difficult. Through a document analysis of 90 HCI publications, we examine what problems and solutions designing for children’s privacy and security addresses and how this research engages with children. Applying Solove’s privacy taxonomy, we find that research addresses a range of problems related to information collection, processing, dissemination, and invasion at the organizational, system, and individual levels. Children’s participation in this research is largely limited to providing feedback rather than helping to guide the research itself. Based on these findings, we offer recommendations for designers to sharpen their privacy and security contributions and center children in their work. 

Researchers and policymakers advocate teaching children about digital privacy, but privacy literacy has not been theorized for children. Drawing on interviews with 30 families, including 40 children, we analyze children’s perspectives on password management in three contexts—family life, friendship, and education—and develop a new approach to privacy literacy grounded in Nissenbaum’s contextual integrity framework. Contextual integrity equates privacy with appropriate flows of information, and we show how children’s perceptions of the appropriateness of disclosing a password varied across contexts. We explain why privacy literacy should focus on norms rather than rules and discuss how adults can use learning moments to strengthen children’s privacy literacy. We argue that equipping children to make privacy-related decisions serves them better than instructing them to follow privacy-related rules. 

The platformization of households is increasingly possible with the introduction of “intelligent personal assistants” (IPAs) embedded in smart, always-listening speakers and screens, such as Google Home and the Amazon Echo. These devices exemplify Zuboff’s “surveillance capitalism” by commodifying familial and social spaces and funneling data into corporate networks. However, the motivations driving the development of these platforms—and the dataveillance they afford—vary: Amazon appears focused on collecting user data to drive personalized sales across its shopping platform, while Google relies on its vast dataveillance infrastructure to build its AI-driven targeted advertising platform. This paper draws on cross-cultural focus groups regarding IPAs in the Netherlands and the United States. It reveals how respondents in these two countries articulate divergent ways of negotiating the dataveillance affordances and privacy concerns of these IPA platforms. These findings suggest the need for a nuanced approach to combating and limiting the potential harms of these home devices, which may otherwise be seen as equivalents.