CAREER: Protecting the Future of Children's Online Identities

这项研究将调查儿童的在线身份是如何建立和管理的，因为他们长大了，特别是在技术的背景下，促进索引和重新显示的个人数据。父母在社交媒体网站上分享关于他们孩子的大量个人信息，通常在孩子出生之前就开始了。因此，孩子们从出生到成年，都是在网上形成和塑造自己的身份。然而，在成年后，他们几乎没有能力修改或删除已经在网上发布的关于他们的内容。此外，标签、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，但对家庭做出如何保存、访问或控制这些数据的决定几乎没有提供任何支持。这项工作将儿童的在线身份作为一个复杂的社会技术系统的一部分，这个系统是由父母、大家庭和社交网络、科技公司、政策制定者和儿童自己形成和塑造的。该项目将首先调查1）家庭在网上分享哪些关于儿童的信息; 2）家庭如何看待过去的身份和未来的身份在网上可用; 3）技术公司围绕儿童的数据管理和存档实践。然后，它将设计和开发原型，以支持家庭对儿童的在线身份进行保护、访问和控制。该研究计划在计算，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挑战，包括如何支持关于儿童在线身份的保存和访问决定，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，教育家庭使用社交媒体和在线共享个人信息。

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.