CAREER: Protecting the Future of Children's Online Identities

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Abstract

This research will investigate how children's online identities are established and managed as they grow up, especially in the context of technologies that facilitate indexing and resurfacing of personal data. Parents share extensive personal information about their children on social media sites, often starting before their children are even born. As a result, children are now growing up with their online identities formed and shaped from birth through adulthood. However, upon becoming adults, they have little ability to revise or remove what has already been posted about them online. Furthermore, computational advancements like tagging, facial recognition, and voice recognition enable searching and indexing of personal data, yet provide little support for families to make decisions about how that data should be preserved, accessed, or controlled. This work casts a lens on children's online identities as part of a complex sociotechnical system that is formed and shaped by parents, extended familial and social networks, technology companies, policy makers, and children themselves. This project will first investigate 1) what information families share about children online; 2) how families think about past identities and future identities being available online; and 3) technology companies' data management and archival practices around children. It will then 4) design and develop prototypes that support families making preservation, access, and control decisions about children's online identities. This research program bridges advances in computation, human-computer interaction, and social computing. It addresses numerous conceptual and technical challenges, including how to support preservation and access decisions about children's identities online, and how to support children's ownership of their own online identities as they grow up. This project includes partnerships with nonprofit agencies to educate families about social media use and sharing personal information online.