Digital Literacy 2.0 : Data & Privacy Online

Children are becoming the objects of a multitude of monitoring devices that generate detailed data about them, and critical data researchers and privacy advocates are only just beginning to direct attention to these practices. In this article, we provide an overview and critique of these varied forms of datafication and dataveillance of children, from in utero through to the school years. Our approach is informed by recent calls for research on children’s rights in the digital age that examines the conditions that give rise to children’s needs and guide provision of resources necessary for development to their full potential, the array of specific harms they may encounter and the significance of and particular opportunities to participate in matters that affect their wellbeing and enable them to play an active part in society. There remains little evidence that specific instruments to safeguard children’s rights in relation to dataveillance have been developed or implemented, and further attention needs to be paid to these issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital privacy has been a concern since the internet became such a popular means of communication. The abundance of computers and smart phones, the proliferation of communication, and the explosion of digital information has precipitated people's disclosure of very personal information online, sometimes unwittingly. Young people, particularly teens, spend a substantial amount of time on internet social media sites such as Facebook and MySpace. Some of the information that users post may not be in their own best interests or those interests of their children. This article describes some of the privacy pitfalls of online social networking and how educators can guide young mothers in its use. These issues are relevant to childbirth educators as they counsel families about the dangers of sharing sensitive information, encouraging them to stay informed regarding security policies in a constantly changing digital era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problematic presumption that users can control the vast consent and data-management responsibilities associated with big data is referred to as the fallacy of data privacy self-management. Though untenable, this presumption remains fundamental to Canadian privacy law, exemplified in the individual access principle of the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act governing commercial data management. This article describes the fallacy, critiques the individual access principle, and introduces potential solutions relevant to Canada's digital strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young people’s engagements with social media now generate large quantities of personal data, with “big social data” becoming an increasingly important “currency” in the digital economy. While using social media platforms is ostensibly “free,” users nevertheless “pay” for these services through their personal data—enabling advertisers, content developers, and other third parties to profile, predict, and position individuals. Such developments have prompted calls for social media users to adopt more informed and critical stances toward how and why their data are being used—that is, to build “critical data literacies.” This article reports on research that explores young social media users’ understandings of their personal data and its attendant issues. Drawing on research with groups of young people (aged 13–17 years), the article investigates the consequences of making third party (re)uses of personal data openly available for social media users to interpret and make critical sense of. The findings provide valuable insights into young people’s understandings of the technical, social, and cultural issues that underpin their ability to engage with, and make sense of, social media data. The article concludes by considering how research into critical data literacies might connect in more meaningful and effective ways with everyday lived experiences of social media use.

The capacity to understand and control one's personal data is now a crucial part of living in contemporary society. In this sense, traditional concerns over supporting the development of 'digital literacy' are now being usurped by concerns over citizens' 'data literacies'. In contrast to recent data safety and data science approaches, this article argues for a more critical form of 'personal data literacies' where digital data are understood as socially situated and context dependent. Drawing on the critical literacies tradition, the article outlines a range of salient socio-technical understandings of personal data generation and processing. Specifically, the article proposes a framework of 'Personal Data Literacies' that distinguishes five significant domains: (1) Data Identification, (2) Data Understandings, (3) Data Reflexivity, (4) Data Uses, and (5) Data Tactics. The article concludes by outlining the implications of this framework for future education and research around the area of individuals' understandings of personal data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper brings together the perspective of social production of space as a 'category' which creates the 'inter-subjective' world of virtual reality where interaction is subjected to individual's virtual 'privacy' and in turn shapes their extended 'self and identity'. This reality keeps on negotiating with the actor as an external entity which can be identified as 'identity' and also as an internal entity which is often categorised as 'self'. The perspectives on extension of space blurred the notion of reality and imagination by identifying itself with Baudrillard's (1983) notion of 'hyper-reality'. And this is being considered to study the 'intersubjectivity' of virtual reality. Empirically, the paper focuses on young Facebook user's behaviour to understand major questions like young users concern on the issue of 'privacy' in virtual space and their presentation of 'self and identity'. For the construction of the young user's notion on "privacy, self and identity", we have considered the qualitative explanation provided by 80 young users across different parts of the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nearly ubiquitous use of online social networks generally entails substantial personal disclosure and elicits significant privacy concerns. This research uses Social Exchange Theory and the impression management (IM) literature to examine how privacy concerns can be counterbalanced by the perceived social benefits afforded by a social network’s ability to support IM. We frame social network use as an attempt to engage in IM, and we highlight the importance of a social network’s IM affordances in predicting social benefits from, and disclosure through, a social network. We test our model with a sample of 244 Facebook users, finding support for the proposed relationships and yielding the following contributions. First, this research provides a novel positioning of perceived IM affordances as a primary driver of both perceived social benefits and IM disclosure propensity. Second, this research illuminates that trust in both the social network provider and social network peers influences privacy concerns, social benefits, and perceived IM affordances. Our theory has important implications for researchers and practitioners interested in privacy issues within social networks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]