Data watchdog goes back to school

Classroom-Management2The Information Commissioner’s Office is going into the classroom in an attempt get young people to better understand data protection laws and help them to protect their personal details.
The move follows a survey of more than 4,000 young people carried out for the ICO in 2011, which found widespread ignorance of data protection issues among young people.
Nearly nine out of 10 (88%) secondary school respondents had a social networking site profile where they shared all manner of personal information, news and views. However, 60% of those questioned had not read the privacy policies of the networking sites they used, while 32% did not know what a privacy policy was, and 23% said they did not know where to find it.
The ICO has called on the services of an experienced secondary school teacher to produce a set of free material to give teachers an introduction to information rights and provide them with a set of lesson activities to raise some of the key issues with students.
The project comprises a series of 10 lesson plans that will explore what is meant by personal data, what people can share and what they should keep safe. Students will learn why personal data is important, how to keep it safe and what their rights are.
Further lesson plans are scheduled to cover the commercial and entrepreneurial uses of open data – a mandatory requirement of the computing curriculum from September 2014.
An ICO spokesman said: “We hope that as a result [of these lessons] children and young people will become aware of the rights they have with their personal information, understand the potential threats to their privacy, and know how to protect themselves.”

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