What privacy, equity, and digital literacy issues should you pay attention to during COVID school closures? Here’s our curated guide.

Written by Monica Bulger and Leah Plunkett
Hello! We are long-time collaborators whose past work includes curating the Student Privacy, Equity, and Digital Literacy Newsletter from the Youth & Media team at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and the Data & Society Research Institute in New York. In the current moment of unprecedented scope and speed of transformation and turbulence in our shared digital lives, we’re reflecting on our past work and bringing it into the present. Realizing that many of us are suffering from information overload while also wanting to stay informed, we’re offering highlights below from the past several weeks of news. We’re excited to circle back going forward with more information curation in the privacy, equity, and digital literacy spaces during the COVID-19 crisis.

Privacy

What’s now and what’s next for monitoring student health and activities?

Zoom bombing, harassment of young students via Blackboard and Google chat, and reports of corporate tracking of students both within and outside of school activities highlight ongoing privacy concerns with education technologies. Nonetheless, opportunities (and sometimes hype!) around edtech continues, often without full consideration for privacy consequences. At issue is that with school closures, teachers and students are required to use apps and tech platforms in their homes that are mostly untested for massive adoption and not thoroughly transparent in the data they collect on students and now by extension, their families.

New concerns are arising that, as schools re-open, students may be required to submit to thermal scanning and contact tracing without adequate privacy safeguards. MIT Technology Review and Privacy International are among a few groups tracking the trackers to monitor privacy violations and raise public awareness of the types of COVID-19 related tracking governments and corporations are engaging.

This is a crucial moment to resist the false trade-off between our shared societal needs (education, public health, public safety, and similar imperatives) and individual privacy. Big tech companies can and should do more to build in privacy into their products and services, as Leah Plunkett argues, especially those used by young people. Indeed, not all expert recommendations for re-engaging with society at large and re-opening schools require potentially privacy-invasive technologies. Julia Marcus, an infectious disease epidemiologist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Population Medicine at Harvard Medical School recommends a harm reduction model that acknowledges people will take risks and offers strategies for reducing harms. NPR published recommendations for increased hygiene practices, smaller schools, and staggered schedules as schools re-open. The American Association of Pediatricians provide guidelines for accommodating needs for students with disabilities, administering school meal programs, and supporting students’ mental health. Monash University published insightful recommendations by their faculty for addressing children’s well-being through promoting a sense of belonging and supporting children as they cope with impacts of economic downturns.

Equity

What’s happening with digital access and digital divides as we stay at home?

The abrupt shift to learning at home highlighted long-observed inequities for students and their families. As districts grappled with how to reach students with schools closed, most turned in one form or another to online learning, despite inequities in access. In the first week of school closures in New York, Vikki Katz and Amy Jordan wrote an op-ed piece highlighting the needs of “under-connected” children and offered steps to mitigate. The New York Times documented the very real struggles families experience as they attempt to access wifi for children’s school work. Many districts prioritized nutrition programs and food distribution for families as well as students. Accelerated device distribution was evident across the U.S., though a few experts warned against its efficacy. The MIT Teaching Systems Lab emphasized inequities of home-based learning. Former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan advises, “We must use this crisis to close the digital divide.”

Not all learning at home experiences are equal. Teachers and education experts are already expressing concern that school closures will broaden the learning gap. Many global child rights organizations have warned that school closures may increase vulnerability for already vulnerable children to abuse at home. A further fear is that without reporting mechanisms provided by schools, many instances of abuse will go unreported. The Berkman-Klein Center convened experts who cautioned: “Containment assumes that people have a safe space to be contained, which raises concerns on a broader scale about vulnerable people, particularly those without shelter, refugees, incarcerated individuals, and detainees.” At stake, too, are the social welfare systems that support and promote children’s mental health.

Digital Literacy

What are we learning from each other — young people and adults — and learning together about how to be engaged, thoughtful digital citizens?

As parents and their children become #wfh “co-workers,” more challenges are emerging around screens — both in terms of screen-time use by youth and parental “sharenting” of private information about their kids through digital devices (both purposefully, like through social media posts, or inadvertently, through adopting digital tech that may not be fully privacy-protecting). Parents are also struggling to provide their kids and teens with guidance and ground-rules to stay safe as more types of digital tech are used and used more often; here’s a good cheat-sheet from the New York Times.

Across age ranges, we are all confronting continued bombardment with disinformation and misinformation. Here are some expert resources to help us navigate digital literacy and digital life more broadly: Sonia Livingstone offers strategies for families to cope with the explosion of misinformation during COVID-19; Robyn Caplan analyzes how we’re facing a “crisis of content mediation” that is bringing us this misinformation; on the 30,000 hours podcast, Monica Bulger speaks with Cathryn Anila who started an NGO, Vanguards4Change as a teenager and offered recommendations for teens to engage in healthy media practices while coping with lockdown; UNICEF sets us up to have accurate, developmentally-appropriate conversations with our children about the realities of COVID-19.

And as we all confront digital life and real life stressors, the American Psychological Association is launching Text, Talk, Act, text-based mental health support.

Deeper dives

- You can hear more from Monica at her new podcast 30,000 hours where she speaks with fellow experts in children’s privacy, equity, and digital literacy.

• You can read more from Leah in her new book Sharenthood: Why We Should Think Before We Talk About Our Kids Online from MIT Press Strong Ideas Series.

Leah A. Plunkett is a law professor & Associate Dean at UNH School of Law and Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center. She researches & writes on digital privacy law, kids, families, education. Author of SHARENTHOOD @MITPress.

Monica Bulger is a Senior Fellow at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, Consultant for UNICEF, and Research Affiliate at Data & Society Research Institute. She studies youth and family media literacy practices and advises policy globally.