Towards Collaborative Family-Centered Design for Online Safety, Privacy and Security

TL;DR

This paper advocates for family-centered design approaches to improve online safety and privacy for teens by fostering parent-teen collaboration, addressing challenges like power imbalances and family conflicts.

Contribution

It introduces family-centered approaches that balance safety and privacy, emphasizing collaborative design to enhance teen self-regulation and open discussions.

Findings

Identifies challenges such as power imbalance and family conflicts.

Proposes collaborative design strategies for online safety.

Highlights the need for future research in family-centered privacy approaches.

Abstract

Traditional online safety technologies often overly restrict teens and invade their privacy, while parents often lack knowledge regarding their digital privacy. As such, prior researchers have called for more collaborative approaches on adolescent online safety and networked privacy. In this paper, we propose family-centered approaches to foster parent-teen collaboration in ensuring their mobile privacy and online safety while respecting individual privacy, to enhance open discussion and teens' self-regulation. However, challenges such as power imbalances and conflicts with family values arise when implementing such approaches, making parent-teen collaboration difficult. Therefore, attending the family-centered design workshop will provide an invaluable opportunity for us to discuss these challenges and identify best research practices for the future of collaborative online safety and privacy within families.