CAREER: Protecting the Future of Children's Online Identities

这项研究将调查儿童的网络身份是如何随着他们的成长而建立和管理的，特别是在促进索引和重新呈现个人数据的技术背景下。父母在社交媒体网站上分享孩子的大量个人信息，通常在孩子出生前就开始了。因此，孩子们在成长过程中，从出生到成年，他们的网络身份一直在形成和塑造。然而，成年后，他们几乎没有能力修改或删除网上已经发布的关于他们的信息。此外，诸如标记、面部识别和语音识别等计算技术的进步使个人数据的搜索和索引成为可能，但对家庭决定如何保存、访问或控制这些数据提供的支持很少。这项工作将儿童的网络身份作为一个复杂的社会技术系统的一部分，由父母、大家庭和社会网络、技术公司、政策制定者和儿童自己形成和塑造。这个项目将首先调查1)家庭在网上分享了哪些关于孩子的信息；2)家庭如何看待过去身份和未来身份在网上的可用性；3)科技公司对儿童的数据管理和存档做法。然后，它将设计和开发原型，以支持家庭对孩子的网络身份进行保存、访问和控制决策。这个研究项目在计算、人机交互和社会计算方面取得了进展。它解决了许多概念和技术上的挑战，包括如何支持保护和获取有关儿童在线身份的决定，以及如何支持儿童在成长过程中拥有自己的在线身份。该项目包括与非营利机构合作，教育家庭如何使用社交媒体和在线分享个人信息。

This research will investigate how children's online identities are established and managed as they grow up, especially in the context of technologies that facilitate indexing and resurfacing of personal data. Parents share extensive personal information about their children on social media sites, often starting before their children are even born. As a result, children are now growing up with their online identities formed and shaped from birth through adulthood. However, upon becoming adults, they have little ability to revise or remove what has already been posted about them online. Furthermore, computational advancements like tagging, facial recognition, and voice recognition enable searching and indexing of personal data, yet provide little support for families to make decisions about how that data should be preserved, accessed, or controlled. This work casts a lens on children's online identities as part of a complex sociotechnical system that is formed and shaped by parents, extended familial and social networks, technology companies, policy makers, and children themselves. This project will first investigate 1) what information families share about children online; 2) how families think about past identities and future identities being available online; and 3) technology companies' data management and archival practices around children. It will then 4) design and develop prototypes that support families making preservation, access, and control decisions about children's online identities. This research program bridges advances in computation, human-computer interaction, and social computing. It addresses numerous conceptual and technical challenges, including how to support preservation and access decisions about children's identities online, and how to support children's ownership of their own online identities as they grow up. This project includes partnerships with nonprofit agencies to educate families about social media use and sharing personal information online.