Has anyone else thought about what we're actually teaching our children about their digital lives?

[enajlm]

I've been home educating for a while now and I spent over thirty years working in cybersecurity and data privacy before I left the corporate world. Something has been nagging at me for months.

We spend a lot of time thinking about what our children learn, maths, English, history, science. But what about the digital world they're already living in? Not online safety in the 'don't talk to strangers' sense. I mean actually understanding what data is, who's collecting it, what their rights are, what an algorithm is doing to what they see.

I started looking into what the national curriculum actually covers on this. The exact statutory wording hasn't changed since 2014. It doesn't mention GDPR, data rights, surveillance or facial recognition once. Not once.

I also looked at what else is available, CyberFirst, Project Evolve, Common Sense Education. All genuinely good in their own way. But none of them were designed for home educators and none of them teach children about their actual data rights under UK law.

The more I dug into it the more I realised this is a genuine gap that nobody has filled.

I've written it all up properly with sources if anyone wants to read it, happy to share the link. I should say, I wrote the article myself, just in case that matters.

I'm also building something to help fill the gap and would love to hear from other home educating families about what they'd actually want covered.

Does this resonate with anyone? What do you do in your home education to cover the digital world?

We talk to our dc on a daily basis about privacy. Ai deep fakes, how giving an email over for a receipt seems fine but it means the company have all your data, how your phone tracks and listen to you at all times, how their conversations in the street are recorded by other people's ring doorbells etc. we talk about algorithms on netflix and YouTube and how you can go down rabbit holes and end up on echo chambers.

We don't home educate in the sense that they go to school though. I don't know why it would be relevant only to people who have dc out of school?

Yes that would be an excellent addition to the curriculum. Most parents also don’t understand any of this

I don't home ed, but I do indeed have plenty of talks with my kids about all this stuff - I also work in IT.

I don't just give rules, but I talk about why the rules are there (eg. not giving your real name/details about yourself, not friending people you don't know in real life, knowing that you can always get up and walk away if someone's being weird or mean, considering the website's authority before signing up/using information from it etc.)

And as they've got older and had more freedom, talking about how things work - what cookies are, and what they do, what AI is and how it works etc. So they can make informed decisions about what they're up to, and understand what is fear-mongering, and what is minimising dangers.

The OP was claiming that his children’s primary school didn’t teach about AI two weeks ago and was trying to sell his app.

It is becoming more and more important.

Obviously, as usual, the government are slow to think and slow to act. There are some movements like Smartphone Free Childhood and the recent announcement that it's not a good idea to share your child's photo on social media/ public forums (about 10 years after it was needed, but at least they've said it now!)

We might be just about getting to the time when people are finally waking up and acknowledging that this is a thing, so yes it's definitely a good time to be acting.

Are you a professional in a relevant area to children/ young people? Do you have a professional forum/ network that you can share this with? There needs to be a conversation (there probably is one happening, somewhere) and sounds like you could usefully add to it.

Ohh. it did smell of sales.

I don't think delegating this to an app is a good idea. I think that informing yourself so you can inform your children is a better one.

The irony of it being an app 😂