Privacy is the ability to keep certain things to yourself, for them not to be seen by or shared with others. When you go online, you may already be thinking about how to keep some things private. It’s important to also think about the data apps and websites collect about you and what they do with this.
Questions you may have
One of the great things about going online is seeing people sharing their lives with others. There are, however, a few things that we would recommend you keep private like your phone number, location, your full name and the school you go to. These parts of your personal information should only be known by people you know offline.
The key is to take control of what you share online and who with. Think carefully about what you want to share and what you want to keep to yourself. Remember to be careful with your bios and the photos you share as you can give away key parts of your life in those too. Privacy settings are a really great way to manage who can see what you post online and we would recommend using them on any online accounts you have.
There are two main reasons. The first is that they need some personal information to create an account. They need a way to contact you and many of them will ask for your age. For example, you should be 13 years of age to use most social media.
The second reason is to build up a profile of you, your interests and habits. This can be used to put things that interest you on your feed or to show you adverts for things you might want to buy. If lots of young people use a certain app or website, brands will pay a lot of money to advertise to young people on there.
Apps and sites should protect your personal data although it has been known for these to be hacked or lost in a data breach. To find out if your email address has ever been involved in a data breach please go to haveibeenpwned.com
If your email address has been breached it is a good idea to change all of your passwords on accounts that use that email address.
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a law that protects your personal data and information. The main thing you need to know is that GDPR protects your data and gives you rights if you are not happy with how it used. This means that companies must:
1. Have a reason for collecting your data
2. Only use your data for that reason
3. Protect your data
4. Delete your data when they no longer need it
It can seem that way when you start typing something into a search engine and it seems to know what you are typing. However, it is much more likely that your phone just knows you incredibly well. It knows where you go, what you like, how old you are and your search habits. Technology is learning and improving all the time, just like you.
You can request that companies send you all the data they have of yours. Social media companies are quite well set up for this and you will often find an option in your account settings which allows you to request this. Once you have made the request, it can take a day or so for the file to be prepared and available for you to download to your device.
Deleting an app does not stop them keeping your data. The only way to do this is to delete your account altogether. Under GDPR rules, the website or app will then need to delete all of your data.
When you visit a website you probably know that the website will track what you do on there to help them know what pages are popular and to spot problems. What you might not realise is that the website you are visiting will often have trackers from other websites tracking what you do and passing that information on too.
Techy tip – There are extensions that you can put on your internet browser that monitor 3rd party sites and trackers. You can see just how many sites are passing this information on and you can stop this information being shared.
Cookies are bits of information collected by the apps and websites we visit online. Whether we close down a page, like something or watch a video every action creates a cookie. Cookies are like a trail of what we have done and this information can be used to improve the apps but it can also be passed on to others to build profiles of us. If you know the Hansel and Gretel story you can think of cookies as the pebbles Hansel drops as they walk through the forest.
If you are online you will be sharing some data but there are steps you can take. We would recommend deleting accounts you no longer use and restricting the data you give away online by stopping sites collecting cookies. Some search engines collect a lot of data so you can also look for search engines that do not collect so much.
If you are worried, we would recommend talking to an adult at school or home. If you want to find out more about privacy, your rights and how your data can be used, please look at this toolkit from the London School of Economics and the Information Commissioners Office. www.lse.ac.uk/my-privacy-uk
Top Tips
- Take control of your privacy – Anything you share online could be shared on and seen by others. Think carefully about what you want to share online and what you want to keep to yourself.
- Use privacy settings – Manage who can see the things you share online and test the settings to see if they are working.
- Respect the privacy of others – Don’t share information or photos of others without their permission. Take something down if they ask you to.
- Minimise the personal data you share – Delete accounts you no longer use, choose ‘reject all’ when asked about cookies and look for search engines that do not collect so much of your data.