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ABSTRACT
Vast amounts of personal data of children are collected and processed in today’s increasingly digital, connected society by public and private actors. Children do have a right to the protection of their personal data and, according to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), even merit specific protection. Children should be clearly informed of and understand what happens with their data when it is collected, processed, stored and transferred. To that end, specific transparency standards require the provision of information in a clear and plain language that the child can easily understand. In this article, after having mapped these existing requirements, the privacy policies of Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok — services which are very popular with children — are evaluated. The findings suggest that such policies are still complex, long and primarily text based. In order to improve this, possible practical ways of enhancing transparency for children such as legal visualization, co-design, co-creation techniques and participatory design methods which focus on presenting legal information in a transparent and clear manner are explored.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. “Processing” is any operation which is performed on personal data, such as, for instance, collection, recording, organisation, structuring, storage, use, disclosure, dissemination, erasure or destruction of data (article 4 (2) of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)).
2. Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC (General Data Protection Regulation).
3. The Article 29 Working Party (further: Art29WP) was a body that consisted of the 28 EU Data Protection Authorities providing guidelines on the implementation of EU data protection law. It has now been replaced by the European Data Protection Board (EDPB).
4. “Personal data” is any information relating to a natural person (or “data subject”) (article 4 (1) GDPR).
5. More information on the research project can be found at https://www.ugent.be/re/mpor/law-technology/en/research/childrensrights.htm.
6. The policies were last reviewed on 1 July 2019.
7. According to the Instagram Terms of Use, the Instagram service is one of the Facebook products: https://help.instagram.com/581066165581870
8. The report does not provide information concerning the size or composition of the group of children who tested the terms and conditions of Instagram (authors’ note).
9. As the list of information items is largely similar in both article 13 and 14 GDPR, in the assessment we only focus on the source of the data – which is particular to article 14 GDPR.
10. The video can be accessed here (in Dutch): “Ketnet en je gegevens”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eg38AkOAKFg. Another example of a video explaining data processing to children can be found here: “My Privacy”, http://www.lse.ac.uk/my-privacy-uk.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Ingrida Milkaite
Ingrida Milkaite is a PhD researcher in the research group Law & Technology at Ghent University, Belgium. She is working on the research project “A children’s rights perspective on privacy and data protection in the digital age: a critical and forward-looking analysis of the GDPR and its implementation with respect to children and youth”. It monitors the implementation of the GDPR in relation to children(‘s rights) from 2017 until 2021. Ingrida is a member of the Human Rights Centre at Ghent University, PIXLES (Privacy, Information Exchange, Law Enforcement and Surveillance) and the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA).
Eva Lievens
Eva Lievens is an Assistant Professor of Law & Technology at Ghent University and a member of the Human Rights Centre, the Crime, Criminology & Criminal Policy Consortium, PIXLES and ANSER. A recurrent focus in her research relates to human and children’s rights in the digital environment. She is a member of the Flemish Media Regulator’s Chamber for impartiality and the protection of minors, the associate editor of the International Encyclopaedia of Laws – Media Law and a contributor to the European Audiovisual Observatory IRIS newsletter for Belgium.