CAREER: Enhancing Privacy Literacy for Elementary School Children via Long-Term Family, School, and Community Partnerships

In our increasingly digital world, children are exposed to technology that collects and uses personal data at younger ages than ever before. This makes understanding and protecting personal privacy a crucial life skill. However, teaching young children about privacy is not just about online safety; it's about empowering them to understand their rights, make informed choices, and build healthy relationships with technology. This project focuses on this urgent need and proposes a collaborative approach to privacy education for elementary school children (ages 5 to 10). The project develops a new learning model that builds partnerships among families, schools, and community organizations like libraries and museums. By working together and leveraging the unique strengths of each role, the project will create a supportive network that reinforces privacy concepts, fosters critical thinking about privacy, and helps elementary children navigate the digital landscape with confidence. This collaborative approach will equip our youngest citizens with the essential tools to protect themselves and respect the privacy of others, ensuring a safer digital future for all. The project work is organized around two main thrusts. In the first thrust, inspired by Epstein's Theory of Overlapping Spheres of Influence, the investigator will conduct interviews, focus groups, and co-design sessions with parents, teachers, and community members to identify opportunities and challenges in supporting partnerships. The results will inform the development of privacy education tools designed to foster collaboration and partnerships among stakeholders. In the second thrust, the project team will conduct a three-year field deployment study to examine the long-term impact of partnership-enabled privacy education on children's privacy literacy development. During the field study, the investigator will deploy the materials, methods, and systems developed in the first thrust with families and collect data about children's privacy literacy development progress through learning stories, questionnaires, interviews, and system logs. These data ensure a comprehensive understanding of children's privacy learning trajectories. This research will yield a novel privacy education framework, design guidelines for collaborative tools, insights into the long-term impacts of privacy education, and an annotated dataset of children's privacy literacy development. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.