Teaching young digital citizens about privacy

The Cyber Safety Project (CSP) wants schools and families to come together as a community and develop skills, habits and self-regulation when using digital technologies for work, life and play.

As part of Privacy Awareness Week, CSP has issued a timely reminder on how to protect personal information online, particularly when it comes to uploading photos and other identifying information which can be gathered and publicly broadcast by another party, usually with malicious intent — a process known as ‘doxing’.

CSP offers the following proactive strategies to protect personal information, which form a usual starting point for a discussion around cyber safety with students:

• Do not upload personal photographs on public profiles, websites or blogs. If you do, make sure that your album is hidden from public and search engines.
• Lock down your personal profiles (to private) and audit your followers to ensure that every person who follows you, you know in person.
• Carefully review what others can see about you in the ‘about me’ sections of your profile.
• Make use of the privacy settings available to you in your social networking and gaming profiles. Whilst they will differ between platforms, look out for ways to protect individual albums, videos, posts and comments.
• Do not use the same email address for all your profiles/accounts. Instead, create separate email IDs for individual activities such as gaming and social networking, forum participation, bank accounts, etc.
• Google yourself to see what information is outwardly published about you online. If there is information about you that you do not want public, request to have it removed. If your information has been shared without your consent, you can report it to https://www.esafety.gov.au/report.
• Discuss your privacy protocols with your friends and family, such as always asking your permission to post photos of you and your family, not sharing the names of your children in public forums, or broadcasting a happy birthday message to you to all that follow them.
   

The Cyber Safety Project offers tools for schools, families and community groups to create safer online interaction. Visit the website for further information.

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