Resources for Teachers - Privacy

Privacy Pirates

This tutorial introduces children, ages 7-9, to the concept of online privacy and teaches them to distinguish between information that is appropriate to give out and information better kept private – and to recognize how this may change in different contexts.

Privacy Pursuit: Protecting Your Privacy

In this lesson, students review what the word “privacy” means in an online context and learn key privacy-related vocabulary. They explore different privacy risks and then learn practical techniques and strategies to manage and protect their privacy. Students then demonstrate their understanding of these strategies by illustrating them. Finally, students revisit material from earlier in the lesson and consider how their actions might put other people’s privacy at risk.

Protecting Your Privacy on Commercial Apps and Websites

Almost all of kids’ favourite apps and websites make money from targeted advertising, which uses their personal information to choose which ads to show them. Many of them also sell the data they collect to data brokers, which use information from many sources to make detailed profiles of users. Some also share it with other apps that are owned by the same company, such as Google and YouTube or Instagram and Facebook. 

Privacy Pursuit: The Value of Privacy

In this lesson, students learn how their personal information is key to how most of the “free” apps and platforms they use make money. They learn practical strategies and tools for managing their privacy and plan how these can be used to limit what audiences have access to their personal information.

Pay For Play

In this lesson, students discuss their experiences playing free online games and then learn the costs of these “free” games in the form of paying with money, sharing personal information or providing attention to advertising or branded content. Students then learn a variety of techniques for mitigating the risks and drawbacks of online games and communicate their learning by describing one of these techniques in video-game terms.