TWC SBE: Small: Helping Teens and Parents Negotiate Online Privacy and Safety

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

The project will use interviews to guide development of new web tools that parents and teens can use to improve communication about the risks of using the web and social media, and to help teens engage in online behaviors that are less risky. The researchers will create simple prototypes of these new tools, pilot testing them to improve them and refine their features by allowing teens and parents to role play using the tools. This research addresses the under-explored area of how parents and teens negotiate and make decisions about teens? online privacy and safety, with the goal of developing proofs of concept of technological solutions that help support parent-teen communication. The project could have a significant impact in helping families negotiate online boundaries and discuss appropriate online behaviors and risks so that parents can make more informed decisions and teens can learn to avoid high-risk behavior. The prototypes are expected to influence the features that social media companies make available to their users. Students in Carnegie Mellon University's Usable Privacy and Security class and Privacy Engineering Master's Program will be actively involved in this project. A "teen panel" of students at a local high school will participate as research interns and in participatory design exercises. The PIs and their students will disseminate outreach materials for parents online and at local schools. As teens increasingly have access to smartphones and the Internet, parents are faced with making decisions about whether and how to monitor and guide their teens' online behavior. To make informed choices, parents need to understand how their teens are using these technologies. Teens may appreciate some parental guidance, but may resent or even circumvent parental monitoring. The research team will first explore the risks related to teens' online activities as well as the concerns and barriers that prevent open communication between parents and teens, building on previous work with experts about risky behavior. Through an iterative design process, researchers will prototype and test a variety of software tools (including standalone tools and features that could be added to existing products and services) to determine how parents and teens would interact with these tools and which they would find most useful. The research plan begins with exploratory interviews with parents and teens to learn what problems most concern families, and which of those pose the highest risk. Interviews will include discussion and role-play of common risk behaviors, as previously identified in interviews with experts. The results from these interviews will guide an iterative design process, in which researchers will develop low-fidelity paper prototypes of tools and features to demonstrate to parents and teens for feedback. Role-playing techniques will be used to facilitate participants' understanding of use scenarios. Researchers will iterate on these prototypes, trying different approaches and features, until additional testing identifies the types of tools and formulations that are most likely to be adopted and used by teens and their parents, with the highest promise for reducing high-risk online behaviors.