Toward a Practice-Based Approach to Privacy Literacy

Children play, communicate, create, learn, and socialize with networked digital technologies. These activities generate data about what children do, where they go, and with whom they interact, raising questions about children's privacy. To help children understand and navigate such questions, information scholars and professionals advocate for privacy literacy efforts. Prior work builds on Nissenbaum's contextual integrity framework to define what privacy literacy is. In this paper, I link this prior work with theories of practice-based learning to begin explaining how educational efforts can help strengthen children's privacy literacy. Drawing on an example of a challenging incident described by an 11-year-old boy, I propose a practice-based approach to privacy literacy. I contend that educational efforts grounded in this approach will not only help children develop the skills they need to navigate privacy concerns, but also help them internalize the value of privacy.

Automated summary

This paper discusses the importance of privacy literacy education for children and proposes a practice-based approach to enhance children's privacy literacy. It aims to help children develop the necessary skills to navigate privacy concerns and internalize the value of privacy.