Children and young people have the right to privacy and family life in the digital environment, including the protection of personal data [2]. Nevertheless, many of the activities that children and adults do online (e.g., using browsers, social networks, and search engines, playing videogames or with smart toys, using apps, etc.) involve some form of automatic processing of children’s personal data [3]. When this happens the user must be informed that data can be processed only when this is laid down by law and when they have consented to it, for example by agreeing to the terms and conditions of use of an Internet service [4]. However, we know from research that complex legal information such as Terms of Use or privacy policies are usually not read nor fully understood by users of online services [5], let alone by children and minors.
Because so much data about children and young people is being collected, processed, and often also commercialised, there are often legitimate concerns that children’s privacy, but also their online safety might be jeopardised [6,7]. Stoilova, Nandagiri and Livingstone (2019) [8] refer to three main contexts in which privacy breaches can occur, namely, interpersonal privacy, commercial privacy, and institutional privacy.
Interpersonal privacy
The use of digital media by parents and the increasing amount of data generated by their parenting practices (e.g., posting children’s photos, sharing children’s experiences in parents’ forums, using tracking devices, etc.) contribute to creating a web presence of the child that children themselves cannot control. Therefore, practices such as sharenting have increasingly raised concerns about children’s privacy, such as the development of children’s digital footprint without them being fully aware of this [3, 9]. In fact, many children and young people disapprove of the content that their parents share online and feel annoyed or embarrassed by this [10, 11, 12, 13]. Many would prefer that their parents involve them more in the decisions they make when sharing content about them online [10, 14, 15, 16, 17].
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Sharenting (share + parenting) is defined as a habitual use of social media by parents to share photographs, events, and news about their children. Parents share this information about themselves and their children via the Internet without having necessarily the consent of the child. [17]
Another breach of interpersonal privacy can come from parents who use technology to track their children’s online behaviour, for instance, through parental controls [18, 19, 20, 21], through apps that monitor foetus’ development [22, 23], or through other forms of child surveillance such tracking how babies and children sleep, play, talk or learn [24]. Because parenting practices are becoming more and more reliant on digital technologies, increasing worries are voiced about the potential negative consequences of these practices for parent-child relations and for children’s interpersonal privacy resulting from intimate dataveillance of children.
"Dataveillance is the combination of data and surveillance. It means surveillance through the use of digital data." [1, p. 4]
Commercial privacy
Most of the apps, social media platforms and online services that children use are owned by private companies and, therefore, although many of these services are “free” or low cost, they are still in essence commercial. What happens is that instead of paying for these services through paid subscriptions, users agree to disclose their personal data in return for the service [1]. Therefore, everything children and young people do online and, thus, all the data generated from their own actions, but also from their interactions with others can be collected, managed, shared, and even sold to other companies, the so-called third parties.
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Although companies argue that they track their customers to give them a better customer experience and provide relevant goods and services, one of the main problems is that most people, including children, don’t know how much of their activities are being tracked nor for what purposes [25]. Because most companies don’t give people clear, individual choices around how their data is used [25] and because research shows that many children do not “have an extensive and nuanced comprehension of issues such as the third-party sale of data” [1, p. 5], much more needs to be done to educate children about these issues and ensure that their privacy is protected by design and by default.
Institutional privacy
Institutions such as schools can also have an impact on children’s privacy. For example, during the Covid-19 lockdowns, it was common to see schools all over the world turning to “free” educational platforms, which exploit children’s data [26, 27, 28], and which a few months later became subscription services. Moreover, research shows that schools have experienced an increase in datafication and surveillance practices [1], and it has become more and more common to use data-driven educational technologies, for example, to provide insights into the learning processes or to personalise the education system for students [29].
When schools make decisions about which educational services to use, students do not have a choice but to participate in the systems that the school offers. This can be problematic because students cannot decide what data from them is collected, by whom or for what purpose [1].
Interestingly, research shows that of the three types of privacy contexts discussed in this section, namely, interpersonal, commercial and institutional, children are less aware of the institutional dimensions of privacy and related potential privacy breaches, such the collection of personal or sensitive data by educational platforms at school [3].
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