What is Privacy?
Now display or distribute page four of the Privacy Pursuit booklet.
Ask students: What does “privacy” mean? What are some times or places where it’s important to have privacy? Are there times when privacy means letting some people see but not others?
For instance, you wouldn’t mind your parents seeing you when you’re asleep, but you might not feel comfortable with your friends seeing you, and you definitely wouldn’t want people that you don’t know at all seeing you.
Can students think of examples of other things that are private for some audiences but not others?
(If you like, you can offer an example of your own. For instance, many of us talk “baby talk” to our pets. We wouldn’t feel embarrassed if a family member or a close friend heard us doing that, but we probably would if somebody else did!)
Display or distribute page two and read the “What Do Kids Do Online?” section to the class.
Now remind students of the discussion you just had about privacy and then ask:
What do things like playing games, watching videos, visiting websites, using social networks, and chatting with friends and family have to do with privacy?
Here are some guiding questions you can use to help them understand the concept of online privacy:
If you are playing an online game with other people, what might they know about you?
The things you say in the chat; your username and avatar or profile picture
If you are watching a video online, what might the video company know about you?
What videos you watched, whether you watched them all the way through, skipped parts, or stopped watching
If you send someone a picture or video with you in it, what might they know about you?
What you look like, what you were doing in the picture or video, anything that’s in the background behind you like pets or family members
Remind students of the idea that whether we think of something as being “private” depends a lot on the audience that is seeing or hearing it.
Now remind students of the three examples you just discussed — playing an online game, watching a video, and sending someone a photo or video of yourself — and ask them what is different about the audience in these cases compared to being in person.
Try to give students the chance to form this concept themselves, but make sure the following points come up:
In an online game, they may not know all of the people in the audience (unless they’re sure that they’re only playing with people that they know offline)
There may sometimes be audiences they don’t know even exist, as in the example of the streaming site
Tto reinforce this, you can ask them whether they think that search engines like Google keep a record of the things they’ve searched for. It will likely be a surprise to many students to find out that they do, and that this information is used to guide future search results and to decide what ads to display.
There can also be future audiences that they can’t predict. For example, if you send someone a photo or video on a networked device, they can make a copy and send it to other people.
