Respect!

Is there such a thing as privacy online? I struggle with the online element of this question as in reality is anything private. As soon as you share anything you are living at someone elses discretion, and they can share this information at anytime. I watched too many movies in the 80’s where someones deepest thoughts were revealed once a diary had been located and read, we can go back further to the 18th Century and Les Liaisons dangereuses where the main protagonist was undone by the letters she had written. Privacy is only as good as the gatekeepers of your information be that in human or electronic form.So how do we handle this in an educational environment. I think that this topic can be split into two categories keeping safe whilst being online and keeping “stuff” as private as possible.Firstly as I have mentioned above I am not sure anything is private and this is the starting point I use with both pupils and parents when I do workshops on this topic. All we can do is make sure we are using the means at our disposal to control our information and our digital footprint. We could attempt to go off the grid, however Evan Ratliffs experience seems to imply that you would need to be very dedicated to that cause and is it really worth it? Maybe a better solution is to be more discerning about what we share and try to manage our online profile.One task we ask parents to undertake is to search for a pupil (who is not there own child), we then discuss what we have found and how security could be improved. There is always the pupil who has kept the privacy settings on Facebook/Instagram up-to-date (as they are always changing) and therefore has minimal on his/her wall and then the pupil who has not and all their images can be seen. This can be a great conversation starter over the kitchen table and gets both pupils and parents discussing privacy online.The other element to privacy is to think before you post. In many ways this is the most valuable discussion we can have. The pupils will continue to migrate to the latest technology and need to have their space (we were all young once and in a world where your parents may have tattoos, piercings and are online, you need another avenue in which to rebel). We can not keep abreast of all the new technology to enforce privacy, we must trust the pupils to do this for themselves. Therefore, if pupils are involved in open and frank discussions on respect then they will be considerate about what they upload and how they use someone elses information. They should be able to ask the question: Is this respectful? Would I be happy for my nan, employer, teacher to see this? If they only upload items that meet these criteria and they implement privacy settings then they should have a healthy online presence and should help others have one too.I need to make it clear that this would be my aim, this is the Eutopia for online presence conversations. Unfortunately, as always, not all pupils are willing to listen and they want freedom in their world and are not ready to think about consequences, this is changing - but very slowly. It would help if they had more conversations at home, however these conservations often look at security and not privacy and respect. Most parents, when they attend the workshops, want to discuss keeping their children safe. I understand this, their child is precious. It is folly not to address this as there are occasions of children being groomed, cyber bullied and intimidated and parents need to have methods and strategies in place to ensure that their child is constantly talking to them if they feel this is happening. However, it is very likely that they will not be faced with these issues. Skenazy writes:

Nothing is ever 100 percent safe—a fact a lot of us have forgotten. But when you do remember this, the Internet seems less like a truck stop after dark, and more like the rest of the world: a reasonable place our kids can hang out with each other.

Security can not be the sole focus, parents and educators need to balance the discussions around privacy and security and in truth we need to model and discuss how we can respect one another. I had to add this video :)[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYbs_O_iMfU[/youtube]Skenazy, L (April 2009) The Myth of Online Predators. Retrieved from https://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2009/04/28/the-myth-of-online-predators.htmlRatliff, E (Nov 2009) Writer Evan Ratliff Tried to Vanish:Here's What Happened. Retrieved from https://archive.wired.com/vanish/2009/11/ff_vanish2/all/ McKeon, M The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook. Retrieved from https://www.mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/