Safeguarding Children’s Digital Privacy: Exploring Design Requirements for Effective Literacy Training for Parents

With the rise of digital technologies, more personal data from children is collected than ever before. Studies have shown that parents frequently fail to effectively protect their children’s online data, often inadvertently putting them at risk instead. Previous research has therefore highlighted a pressing need for new privacy literacy training aimed at parents. However, to our knowledge, research has so far failed to investigate the design requirements necessary for the efficacy of these new programmes. This study aims to address this gap by pairing the perspectives of parents and media educators on privacy literacy training. Through qualitative and exploratory studies, parents and media educators were interviewed to gain insights into how privacy education approaches can be enhanced. The findings illuminate the disparities and concurrences between these two cohorts, thereby unveiling areas that require improvement. This research significantly contributes to the understanding of how to design more effective privacy literacy training for parents in order to protect children’s privacy online.