Abstract

The objective of this research is to address the acute privacy challenge of protecting children’s online safety by proposing a technological solution to empower parental control over their child’s personal information disclosed online. As a preliminary conceptual investigation, this paper draws on the social, psychological, and legal perspectives of privacy to derive three design principles. We propose that, the technical systems for protecting children’s online privacy (a) should protect children’s personal information online while enabling their access to appropriate online content, (b) should maximally facilitate parental involvement of their children’s online activities, and (c) should comply with legal requirements in terms of notice, choice, access and security. This study reported here is novel to the extent that existing IS research has not systematically examined the privacy issues from the VSD perspective. We believe that, using the groundwork laid down in this study, future research along these directions could contribute significantly to addressing parental concerns for children’s online safety.

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