Nurturing Digital Safety: Unpacking Privacy and Security Challenges for Young Children in Emergency Remote Learning

This blog post summarizes the paper “We picked community over privacy”: Privacy and Security Concerns Emerging from Remote Learning Sociotechnical Infrastructure During COVID-19. This paper will be presented at the 26th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, a top venue for social computing scholarship. It will also be published in the journal Proceedings of the ACM (PACM).

What are we studying?

Children access digital devices from a very young age. With technology becoming an integral part of education, even kindergartners are actively engaged with digital platforms on a regular basis. This was particularly the case in the context of emergency remote learning (ERL) prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic. As technology is increasingly used in K-12 education, it becomes increasingly important to address the associated privacy and security risks impacting students.

What did we do?

Given the unprecedented scale of technology use during pandemic-era ERL, we took the opportunity to interview 29 US-based teachers and parents of elementary school children. Rather than frame privacy and security as purely technical issues, we investigated how these concerns were grounded in sociotechnical infrastructure. Drawing on science and technology studies (STS), we analyzed the breakdowns and tensions within this sociotechnical system that gave rise to parents’ and teachers’ privacy and security concerns.

What did we find?

Sociotechnical breakdowns impacting privacy and security:

1. The overwhelming array of digital tools — our participants named over 80 — used by parents and teachers to make ERL work meant that a higher priority was placed on getting this patchwork of tools to achieve learning objectives (and function at all) than on student privacy and security.
2. Ambiguous and frequently shifting school policies — on topics such as camera use and lesson recording — left parents and teachers struggling to implement consistent privacy and security measures.
3. Authentication infrastructure proved problematic for young children who, for example, could not easily remember passwords or lacked email addresses, and thus required adult intervention.

Privacy and security tensions in ERL:

1. The first tension existed between the pursuit of learning objectives and increased surveillance by parents, teachers, and institutions. Parental and teacher surveillance encompassed aspects such as using GoGuardian to see everything on a child’s screen, while institutional surveillance extended to school administrations and tech companies hoovering up more data than pre-pandemic, for example due to lessons being video recorded.
2. The second tension centered around the shifting boundaries of home and school as video calls and synchronous remote learning blurred the lines between these traditionally separate domains. For example, more than one teacher told us about the shock and discomfort of witnessing abuse in the home (sometimes with an entire second grade class) and needing to call child protective services.

Where do we go from here?

Contingent sociotechnical systems: Our paper introduces the concept of a “contingent sociotechnical system” to describe the ad hoc and precarious nature of ERL. Within such systems, privacy and security take a back seat as actors prioritize the system’s stability. We argue that it is imperative to strengthen privacy and security during periods of relative stability to ensure resilience in the face of unexpected disruptions like ERL.

Considering privacy and security as care for young children: Our research argues for situating privacy and security for elementary school children within a framework of care. Recognizing that absolute privacy and security are unattainable, we propose building on prior work that frames privacy and security as acts of ongoing care for both technical systems and their users. Children are already cared for by adults in their lives, and we consider how privacy and security is another dimension to this care.

In conclusion, our paper underscores the need for an infrastructural and care-based approach to addressing privacy and security concerns for elementary school children. By shifting the perspective from privacy and security as purely technical threats towards showing how these issues are rooted in sociotechnical breakdowns and tensions, we open up new avenues for solutions that care for children as they navigate the digital world.