Thank you very much.
Hello, I am Jane Tallim, co-executive director of MediaSmarts. With me is Matthew Johnson, who is our director of education and resident privacy expert. Thank you so much for inviting us here today.
We've been following the testimony to this committee with great interest and the many excellent recommendations that you've received so far. We've also noticed the number of expert witnesses who have stated that education, especially for children and youth, is an essential part of a comprehensive approach to addressing online privacy issues.
With this in mind, we would like to focus our remarks on how digital literacy, and in particular privacy education, can help young people develop good privacy habits for social media and other online activities.
Today's presentation is very timely because next week is Canada's annual Media Literacy Week. It's co-led by the Canadian Teachers' Federation and us. This year's theme is “Privacy Matters”. On Monday we'll be in Montreal hosting a youth panel exploring this topic to launch the week.
For those of you who aren't familiar with our organization, MediaSmarts is a national not-for-profit centre for digital and media literacy. We work to ensure that children and youth have the critical thinking skills to engage with media as active and informed digital citizens.
We were launched in 1995 as Media Awareness Network through a CRTC initiative on television violence. The commission's policy on this issue stated that although industry self-regulation and TV classification systems would play a role, public awareness and media literacy programs represented the primary solution to TV violence.
The same thinking applies today to online privacy. Given the inherent difficulties legislators face keeping up with constantly evolving platforms and applications, education plays a critical role in helping Canadians of all ages understand their rights and manage their privacy and personal data.
Digital literacy is the term we use to describe the range of skills needed by young people to make wise, informed, and ethical online decisions. Privacy management is one of these core skills.
Our digital literacy resources and programs are informed by our ongoing research project, Young Canadians in a Wired World. This is Canada's longest running and most comprehensive investigation of the behaviours, attitudes, and opinions of Canadian children and youth with respect to their use of the Internet.
One of our key areas of inquiry is young people's understanding and behaviours relating to online privacy, including the types of privacy invasions they encounter, and the role of adults in building awareness and influencing behaviours.
We recently launched phase three of the young Canadians project with funding from the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. Dr. Valerie Steeves of the University of Ottawa, who is our lead investigator, presented our qualitative findings to this committee in May, so you've already had a snapshot of how online surveillance has become a reality for today's youth.
Although young people find the constant surveillance annoying, persistent myths about stranger danger and Internet risks encourage them to buy into the idea that they need to be monitored to keep them safe online. The constant surveillance by parents, schools, and corporations, and young people's acceptance of it is cause for concern. Privacy is a fundamental human right, and continuous surveillance chips away at our private space. Moreover, this constant scrutiny undermines the mutual trust, confidence, and communication between adults and youth that is essential to giving young people the autonomy they need to develop digital life skills.
Finally, if youth grow up in an environment where surveillance at home and at school is normal and accepted, they are less likely to be aware of or to exercise their privacy rights regarding corporate surveillance.
We're going to be heading into classrooms across the country next February with our national survey to explore many of the privacy issues that emerged in the qualitative study. Specifically, we want to learn where the gaps are in digital literacy skills so we can address them in educational materials for classrooms and communities. For example, we'll be asking students if anyone has ever taught them how to read privacy policies or terms of use on websites.
Drawing from past young Canadians research findings, we have developed an extensive collection of resources on privacy management, ranging from games to teach good privacy habits to young children, to a comprehensive professional development workshop that trains teachers in how to address and improve the state of privacy as it pertains to the online activities of their students.
In our educational materials we focus on encouraging youth to make good choices about their own privacy, and also on teaching privacy ethics. Not only is it important to have our privacy respected and protected, we need to respect and protect the online privacy of others. This idea is most immediately relevant when it comes to social interactions online, but it has implications for corporate uses of privacy as well. One reason we place privacy education in the context of digital literacy is that, as other presenters have noted, privacy is not a stand-alone issue. It intersects with safety, cyber security. cyber bullying, authentication of information and digital citizenship.
An important part of digital citizenship is understanding and exercising your rights, both as a citizen and a consumer. To do that, youth need to know that their personal information has value and that they have legal and contractual recourse in protecting it.
Perceived importance of information privacy is a critical factor in determining how well young people manage their online privacy. With children going online at increasingly younger ages, this sense of that personal information is valuable and belongs to oneself is important to cultivate, even at the primary level. For example, we have a Privacy Pirates game on our website, which was funded by Google. It helps younger students start to understand this concept.
Support for the critical importance of privacy education for youth has precedent in Canada and internationally. In 2008, Canada's privacy commissioners and privacy oversight officials passed a resolution on children's online privacy, where they committed to improve the state of privacy as it pertains to the online activities of children and youth by implementing public education activities to increase their awareness of online privacy risks. Since that time, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner has produced several excellent educational resources and has funded organizations, including ours, to produce privacy education materials.
In February of this year, the OECD adopted a recommendation on enhanced children's online protection, recognizing that the protection of children online encompasses content risks, contact risks, consumer risks, and risks relating to information security and online privacy. The OECD recommends that national governments foster awareness raising and education as essential tools for empowering parents and children, and develop responses that include all stakeholders, and integrate a mix of public and private, voluntary and legal, awareness raising, educational, and technical measures.
Good comparative models for Canada are Britain and Australia. Both have strong digital literacy components in their national digital strategies. In Australia, the federal regulator, ACMA, produces many resources addressing children's online privacy concerns. In the U.K., they've coined the notion that Britons should bear a digital entitlement, which includes not only access but also the right to basic digital literacy skills, including privacy.
The notion of privacy education for all is essential to fostering informed citizens who recognize and challenge invasive practices online. As several witnesses have noted, when the public pushes, the industry tends to pull back.
It's a widely held belief that young people, whether they be Facebook addicts or aspiring YouTube celebrities, don't care about privacy. This isn't true. In fact, the way youth understand privacy may be more relevant than how most adults view it, because they see it not as a matter of deciding whether or not to share, but as having control over the things they want to share.
To support youth, we need to widen the current focus on privacy safety risks to include privacy rights, ethical use, recourse mechanisms, and the civic and democratic dimensions of privacy. Privacy education must be supported on a national level, both through the K to 12 curriculum in schools and public awareness campaigns to inform ail Canadians.
Thank you.