Based on your interests and/or workplace context, after exploring some of the above resources, reflect on your new learning about one of the above areas of concern (in terms of your possible work as an information professional) in a 350 word post in your learning journal.

As the Internet has evolved and expanded, so have the ways that social media platforms and search engines, such as Facebook and Google, monitor and collect data of end users (Crocco et al., 2020; Marino, 2021). In educational contexts, this means that students may inadvertently share their private information while conducting an online search for their school assignments, or while participating in the school Facebook page. In view of this threat to a child’s personal security, it is imperative that both subject teachers and teacher librarians equip themselves with the necessary tools to deliver privacy training as part of digital literacy endeavours (Marino, 2021).

When children use the internet to access information, they will always leave a digital footprint behind them. For example, if they fill up a form or sign up for a newsletter, do they actually know who is going to use their details, and more importantly, how they are going to use them? In light of this potential risk, it is paramount that students gain knowledge of what big tech companies are doing to harvest their data, for example through the integration of third party software applications in educational and library websites (Marino, 2021).

These are the important questions that we need to engage our students in, both in specific subjects, and in wellbeing programs delivered as whole school initiatives (Crocco et al., 2021). When students provide personal information online, what databases do their details sit in, and do these become used by a third party (Marino, 2021)?  Information about them may give online companies commercial knowledge about their interests, and this information can be sold on to other companies without their permission or even awareness that this lucrative manipulation of their information is taking place (Crocco et al., 2021).

Students need to be careful, realising that information is harvested and used, and sold on. As a librarian I can have open discussions about the strategies that companies put in place to share data (Marino, 2021). However, I am not going to be able to to stop this practice, and anybody can be susceptible. It doesn’t matter how old you are, or how bright you are. While children are tech-savvy and fluent online, big tech companies still succeed in obtaining valuable personal data, especially due to the extended hours children spend online (Crocco et al., 2020).

Students need to be made aware that giving away their personal data to other companies means that it can be sold on by third parties. Their data is valuable. Their profile gives these big companies commercial knowledge in what Zuboff has termed surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019). As a teacher librarian I can hold critical literacy information classes about use of data, privacy, and the prevalence of third party tracking software. With this crucial knowledge, students will be able to take control over their user privacy online (Marino, 2021).

References

Crocco, M.S., Segall, A., Halvorsen, A.L., Stamm, a., & Jacobsen, R. (2020). “It’s not like they’re selling your data to dangerous people”: Internet privacy, teens, and (non-controversial public issues. Journal of Social Studies Research, 44(1), 21-33.

Marino, B. (2021). Privacy concerns and the prevalence of third-party tracking cookies on ARL library homepages. Reference Services Review, 49(2), 115-131

Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Right for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Public Affairs. NY