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Online learning: How to protect children's personal data
Governments and parents must up their game in protecting children's privacy while they are online, even during online learning.
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Play it safe: Children surf the internet using free Wi-Fi provided by the Karanganyar village administration in Ciamis regency, West Java, on June 21. Children in Indonesia are left unprotected in the cyberworld, according to a Human Rights Watch report.
(Antara/Adeng Bustomi)
H
uman Rights Watch (HRW) recently issued a 94-page report titled How Dare They Peep into My Private Life? Children’s Rights Violations by Governments that Endorsed Online Learning During the COVID-19 Pandemic, which found that 49 countries in the world had violated children's right to privacy while mandating online learning during the pandemic.
The report also found that 164 educational technology (edutech) products and 290 companies had collected, processed or received children's data since March 2021.
Around 89 percent of these products engaged in practices that violated children's rights. These products monitored the children without their or their parents’ consent. These products also retrieved personal data, such as who they are, where they are, who their families are, who their friends are, what they did in class and what kind of device they were using.
Surprisingly, the report mentions Indonesia. The HRW report found that several digital learning platforms installed tracking technology that spied on children from time to time, while children were engaged in online learning as well as when they were not in a digital classroom.
In addition, these platforms retrieved children's private data and provided them to third-party companies for analysis, with an aim to identify a child's personal characteristics and interests to predict what that child might do next and how it might affect them. Access to the children's private data was then sold to advertisers, data intermediaries and other companies that target specific groups of people with similar characteristics online.
The HRW report called on governments to adopt a children’s online privacy protection law to protect children online. This needs to be followed up.
Article 16 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child makes it very clear that "every child has the right to privacy". Also, national laws protect the privacy, communication and reputation (good name) of children, families and homes from any attack.
