“Take the picture or not take the picture?”: children’s awareness of when private information should be protected

Children develop an understanding of privacy through real and virtual experiences. As digital sharing becomes increasingly common, so does the risk of privacy violations, highlighting the growing need for researchers to study children’s reasoning about when and how to protect their personal information. The present study examined how children reason about the sharing of personal images and how this reasoning changes with age. Two within-subjects experiments were conducted with children aged 5–8 years old. In Experiment 1 (N=82), children were told that a girl named Sally should “keep things private” while playing an online game and then decided whether the game should take pictures of either real Sally or a cartoon avatar in different household settings. Younger children (5–6 years old) were generally uncertain about whether images should be shared, whereas older children (7–8 years old) were more likely to endorse withholding images of real Sally but remained uncertain about cartoon images. An exploratory analysis further indicated that younger children who understood the privacy prompt were more likely to endorse withholding images than those who did not. Experiment 2 removed the cartoon avatar to test whether children’s responses were driven by the image content. Results (N = 87) replicated the pattern of withholding images of real Sally while showing greater acceptance of sharing cartoon rooms, suggesting that with age children increasingly consider the personal nature of information when reasoning about privacy protection.

Author dc:creator

• Petriw, Sarah

Advisor dc:contributor.supervisor

• Nancekivell, Shaylene

• digital privacy
• privacy protection
• privacy norms
• children’s privacy

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1993/39914

OAI record oai:identifier

https://mspace.lib.umanitoba.ca/oai/request?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=dim&identifier=oai%3Amspace.lib.umanitoba.ca%3A1993%2F39914