Status of Women committee  Both of those are really complicated notions to unpack. In fact, we were careful in our questionnaire not to use the term “cyberbullying” because we have a strong sense, from American research, that this is not a term that has meaning for youth. It's something they see adults using.

Status of Women committee  Yes, that's right.

Status of Women committee  It's slightly lower. It's roughly 8%. That's 8% of those students who had access to a cellphone in grades 7 through 11.

Status of Women committee  You can actually find the methodology in our research, which is available online. All of our research and 95% of our teacher, parent, and youth resources are available for free on our website online, so I won't go into it in too much detail. Essentially it was conducted in classrooms.

Status of Women committee  I think with regard to that 90%, what's important to remember is that in our statistics, it was simply a question of whether a photo had been forwarded and not whether it was consensual or not. It was not whether the person reporting it had any issue with it. There's very little quantitative data worldwide on forwarding.

Status of Women committee  I'd like to start by thanking the committee for the opportunity to present our research and our resources today. Since 2001, MediaSmarts has been conducting a research report entitled “Young Canadians in a Wired World”. It looks at Canadian students' experiences with networked technology.

Information & Ethics committee  Absolutely. A study was done just last year with pre-service teachers, or teacher candidates, in Ontario. They said overwhelmingly that they did not feel they were being prepared to deal with the various digital issues they were going to face in the classroom. One of the ones they touched on was cyber-bullying, which is top of mind for many people.

Information & Ethics committee  I will add very briefly that whatever regulation or legislation takes place, it is really important that the education piece be there, to make sure young people are aware of the rights they have under legislation or regulation. Research has shown that a large proportion of young people in the United States believes the law in that country protects their privacy more than it actually does.

Information & Ethics committee  I'd like to add to that. It's important to know as well that when young people go online, not only are they subject to the same privacy risks as adults, but they're actually subject to greater risks. We know from research done around the world that young people are tracked online more aggressively than adults.

Information & Ethics committee  Just to clarify, it's our research that is studying grades 4 to 11. There are a number of reasons for this. One is so that we can compare data with earlier surveys that covered that age range. But our resources cover the full K to 12 curriculum. We've made an effort in the last few years to produce more digital literacy resources for younger children, because we know that young people are going online earlier and earlier.

Information & Ethics committee  Another point where it is relevant is that educating young people is only half the job. The other half is educating parents and grandparents and the general public. That's definitely a role the federal government can play. Our own research showed that one of the reasons parents and young people both tended to accept the idea of surveillance—even though young people were doing a lot of things to escape surveillance, they accepted the idea that they would be subject to it—was they all subscribed to a number of inaccurate notions about online risks.

Information & Ethics committee  To add to that, you had asked how it is we can teach privacy skills to different ages. I'll answer, just from our perspective, that all of our resources are created by educators as well as by people who are experts in digital literacy issues, including privacy. That means everything we do is based in part on our understanding of pedagogy and cognitive development.

Information & Ethics committee  Legislation may well play a role. Certainly our position is that young people do need to understand what they're agreeing to. They need to understand when they use any service what information they are giving out, what information about their activities may be collected, and what will be done with that information by either the operator of the service or third parties to whom it may be sold.

Information & Ethics committee  I'd like to add that you're absolutely right that simply providing tools to protect privacy is not enough. We know this from a study that was done at Columbia University in the United States. It found that of the participants in the study, and these were students ages 18 to 25, 95%, or almost all of them, had changed their privacy settings on Facebook and felt confident that these settings reflected their desired privacy.