Respect my privacy, hide my face!

Before starting my readings for this post, I was sure that I was fully managing my digital profile and therefore my privacy was respected. What makes me think that? As I explained in a previous post, ten years ago, I was a wannabe journalist. To promote myself I joined LinkedIn. As I wanted to grow my professional network and that I was on the look out for job opportunities, I used it to show case my works. So it made sense for me to be very careful about what to post online. Every once in a while, I checked my digital profile to make sure that I was easy to find and that there were no confusion.
My full name is not that common. If you searched for it you were likely to find my LinkedIn profile and some articles that I wrote years ago. At the end of the search, you’d probably find this funny cartoon character from Brazil. This Magali has a passion for food! And then my surname gave approximate results with “brutal” so it linked to lots of news website. No worries that it could be me!
As for other social networks like Facebook, I’ve always used all the privacy settings and rarely posted things. (By the way it said that security settings are not perfect but I can’t find my profile. If you ever find something, let me know! Thanks!).  Regarding Twitter, I didn’t have an account at that time and until recently I was a lurker! After reading “5 tips for teaching kids to curate their digital footprints” and “How you’re unknowingly embarrassing yourself online (and how to stop)” I did a thorough online search. On top of the links described earlier, I found my Coetail blog and pictures and links from my school website. All of those were properly linked but I didn’t put them online.

Privacy from a student's point of view

In this video, Lori Andrews, Distinguished Professor of Law and Director of the Institute for Science, Law and Technology, Illinois Institute of Technology, author of the book “I know who you are and I saw what you do” explained why privacy online does not exist.

So the question now is how could I make sure that my students understand the issue of privacy and the importance of responsible use of the Internet? We already had a beginning of the discussion few weeks ago. I had my grade 5 group to create a quiz about geography. Then I recorded them asking their questions like in a TV show. As I started to record, one of my students told me that if I were to put the recording on my wiki, she didn’t to have her face visible. I was a bit surprised by the request as the idea behind embedding the recording was for the students to share with their parents and to answer the questions. To respect her privacy, we set up a scene where we couldn’t see students’ faces.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrC_92vWs7Q[/youtube]
As I want to share online more work from my students and then to move slowly to blogging, I want to teach them :

1- to be safe online

2- to have a positive digital footprint by "working to build links to high quality content" as Alissa Sklar said.

Back to the discussion with my students, I was questioning myself of not how to teach them privacy and safety but where and when to start. This discussion was right on time. I thought it was an interesting thing to say for a ten-year old. I’m planning now of introducing those issues step by step. Before I would share something (projects, posters, dialogues...) online, we also agree that their faces would stay hidden.