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在他们成长过程中建立和管理的，特别是在促进个人数据索引和重新显示的技术背景下。父母在社交媒体网站上分享关于孩子的大量个人信息，通常在孩子出生之前就开始了。因此，孩子们现在的成长过程中，他们的网络身份从出生到成年都在形成和塑造。然而，一旦成年，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，标记、面部识别和语音识别等计算进步支持对个人数据进行搜索和索引，但几乎不支持家庭就如何保存、访问或控制这些数据做出决定。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投射到镜头中，该系统由父母、扩展的家庭和社交网络、技术公司、政策制定者和儿童本身形成和塑造。该项目将首先调查1)家庭在网上分享关于儿童的哪些信息；2)家庭如何看待在线可获得的过去身份和未来身份；3)科技公司围绕儿童的数据管理和档案做法。然后，它将设计和开发原型，支持家庭对儿童的在线身份做出保存、访问和控制的决定。这一研究计划将计算、人机交互和社会计算的进步联系在一起。它解决了许多概念和技术挑战，包括如何支持保存和获取关于儿童在线身份的决定，以及如何支持儿童在成长过程中对自己的在线身份拥有所有权。该项目包括与非营利性机构合作，教育家庭有关社交媒体的使用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.