Online Privacy for Parents and Youth

Deciding how to help youth use the internet—including engaging with video games, social media, web search, and everything else—is a complicated topic that touches on many different skillsets and ideas. But ultimately, it is up to families to decide when and how to engage with these sorts of questions.

Each young person has unique developmental needs, and, just like their wardrobe, that changes as they age. What's right for one person may not be for another. Trying to protect your family from everything all the time is impractical and exhausting, but some thoughtful planning can help you find the best, most efficient solutions.

Solutions are not necessarily about just the tools or software you use. It’s about understanding the threats and concerns you have, and then determining what steps you can take to mitigate those risks. In security, we call this process security planning (or threat modeling), and it’s as applicable in deciding how to manage the privacy and security of youth as it is for adults.

This guide is meant to be an introduction to thinking about how to help parents and youth engage with technology in a safe and privacy-protective way. It is not a toolkit for deciding how much screentime to manage, when to introduce youth to devices or the internet at large, or about what games or social media is acceptable.

With online security, it’s impossible to protect everything all the time. Instead, it’s best to decide what is valuable to you and focus on that. The same process we use to figure out what matters in security can be useful when deciding how to integrate different technologies into your family. We can take our security plan and apply it here, with this set of questions:

Take some time and answer the questions for your family. Let’s run through an example:

What do I want to protect?

Typically when we talk about security, we talk about “assets ” here, but it makes more sense to think about how youth use various platforms, and what those platforms are. Make a list of devices in the house, and the apps and services everyone uses. Take some time to get this right; it should be more specific than “I want to protect a young person.”

Example: I want to protect a young person’s privacy and mental health when they’re playing Roblox. They love Roblox and use it to communicate and hang out with their best friend, so we’d like to find a way to make it as safe as possible.

Who do I want to protect it from?

To answer this, it’s useful to think through and identify who or what a young person might interact with online. What are we trying to protect them from? Potential adversaries can be ad tech companies, bullies, strangers online, or the government.

Example: Messages from strangers, staying up too late playing, wasting money on pointless digital junk in games.

How bad are the consequences if I fail?

Depending on the platform and the device, there are many ways youth might interact with the threats you identified above. What could happen if they did? Understanding this can help you prioritize what’s important and within your control.

Example: Varies from losing some money on a useless cosmetic item or scam, to having creepy conversations with strangers that could escalate into something more nefarious or dangerous.

How likely is it that I will need to protect it?

Risk is the likelihood that a threat will actually happen. It is important to distinguish between what might happen and the probability it may happen. Assessing risks is both a personal and a subjective process.

Example: I don’t know the likelihood of a stranger messaging on Roblox because I’m not sure how communication works on the platform, but I’ve heard from their friends that strangers message them all the time in some games.

How much trouble am I willing to go through to try to prevent potential consequences?

There is no perfect option for privacy and security online. You will need to decide how much effort you’re willing to go through to protect what you’re concerned about. In the case of youth and tech, this can include taking a significant amount of time to learn exactly how a product—like a game or app—works.

Example: I’m willing to sit down and learn how the game works, then spend the time figuring out how to work the parental controls.

Who are my allies?

Parenting, just like digital privacy and security, is a collective effort. This is especially true when thinking through how youth interact with the internet, technology, and their friends and families through various online platforms.

Example: My partner, our parents, as well as a young person’s best friends and their parents.

With these questions, you can start to focus on what’s important for your family, which can then lead to figuring out what steps to take to best achieve those goals. If you try to tackle every possible worry you might have about the internet as a whole, it will be overwhelming!

It’s important to reassess and adapt to these questions over time. The concerns you have for a five year old are not the same as an eight year old, a 12 year old, or a 17 year old. This is an ongoing discussion, and one you should revisit frequently to review apps and settings and address whether anything needs changing. The good news is that it’s also a good way to build trust with a young person, so they are more likely to come to you when anything weird happens on a platform.

Which software, devices, and tools youth access is a conversation best managed between parent and child. These conversations will always differ between families, but here are some questions to ask yourself to help get those conversations started:

There is no tool or technology fix that can substitute for spending time learning, and then teaching a young person, how the internet works, how to use it, what sorts of harms exist, and how to navigate those harms.

While time-consuming, it is helpful to learn how the apps, games, and services a young person wants to use actually work. For example, games like Minecraft might seem complicated because Minecraft is as much a social space for youth as it is a place to play the game. Spending some time with it yourself will help you understand what your real concerns are. The same goes with anything else online.

These decision points where you’re exploring with a young person what you’re both comfortable with can be good moments to “find your way to a yes” for whatever feature or tool or game they’re asking about. The questions they ask, along with your responses, provide a road map for what to look for in privacy controls that can get you to a place where everyone is comfortable engaging with that technology.

Let’s think about how the above applies to a conversation around online privacy. A good place to start is an assessment of what you have already done as a parent/guardian.