In some filtered posts on LJ, I’ve written about a situation that happened with LAUSD. In talking with the Principal this morning, one thing we came to realize is that high school students don’t understand how privacy works on the Internet. They don’t understand how to adjust privacy settings, they don’t know how widely things can be seen, they don’t understand how this can haunt you. They don’t understand, for example, that something you say in confidence to a friend about a third party can reappear on the net, and even be visible to that party. Some of this comes from their belief that they are invicible, but some comes from simple lack of knowledge. Some of it is due to the applications themselves: witness the defaults on the recent Facebook privacy changes, or how much information goes to Facebook applications.
So I did a stupid. I volunteered to see if I could work up a talk for the high school students about Facebook and Privacy, and similar subjects.
So, here’s where I need your help, especially my colleagues in the Computer Security field. We would need to develop a half-hour entertaining program for these kids, to be presented sometime in June. If we do this right, it could be a program we could reuse at other LA Unified schools, and quite possibly pass around nationally. In short: do it right, and were doing (big deep echoey voice here) A Good Thing. I need to figure out the team to develop it; I need to figure out whether we just want to address Facebook, or add in Twitter (do they have privacy there?), You Tube, and perhaps even MySpace. I’d include LJ, but it’s so 2004 :-). Should we address cell phone privacy, such as the fact your GPS location is continually broadcast with the smartphones out there, and that malicious smartphone apps could easily snoop telephone calls or open cameras or microphones (and we won’t even go into laptop webcams).
So, what do you think? Willing to help?
