This collaborative project explores teenagers' understanding and engagement with privacy, including tool development for strengthening the understanding management of privacy in digital media among U.S. teenagers. Through interviews and focus groups the PIs identify how sociocultural differences, like race and class, impact how teenagers engage with privacy both in their online presence and through their usage of devices and apps. The systematic examination of differences in race and socioeconomic status has been understudied, but creates significant variances in social norms and education around technology and privacy. Revealing how sociocultural groups navigate social pressures, norms, varying exposure/access to different technologies and platforms, and their own digital identity formation and maintenance, allows greater understanding regarding how teenagers formulate their attitudes and behaviors towards privacy. This project adds nuance to the current research on teens and privacy, and corrects false impressions regarding their behaviors, if any, while also leveraging the data from participants to engage them in a participatory privacy tool design and building process. The Broader Impacts of this project include the tools being developed, provided to teenagers and those involved in the lives of teens such as teachers. The research concerning the impact of sociocultural differences, as well as the research behind the development of the tools is available to other investigators, program and software developers.
EAGER: Privacy's Sociocultural Divide across American Youth