Parenting from the pocket

Abstract

An increasing number of high-tech devices, such as driver monitoring systems and Internet usage monitoring tools, are advertised as useful or even necessary for good parenting of teens. Simultaneously, there is a growing market for mobile personal safety devices. As these trends merge, there will be significant implications for parent-teen relationships, affecting domains such as privacy, trust, and maturation. Not only the teen and his or her parents are affected; other important stakeholders include the teen's friends who may be unwittingly monitored. This problem space, with less clear-cut assets, risks, and affected parties, thus lies well outside of more typical computer security applications.To help understand this problem domain and what, if anything, should be built, we turn to the theory and methods of Value Sensitive Design, a systematic approach to designing for human values in technology. We first develop value scenarios that highlight potential issues, benefits, harms, and challenges. We then conducted semi-structured interviews with 18 participants (9 teens and their parents). Results show significant differences with respect to information about: 1) internal state (e.g., mood) versus external environment (e.g., location) state; 2) situation (e.g., emergency vs. non-emergency); and 3) awareness (e.g., notification vs. non-notification). The value scenario and interview results positioned us to identify key technical challenges -- such as strongly protecting the privacy of a teen's contextual information during ordinary situations but immediately exposing that information to others as appropriate in an emergency -- and corresponding architectural levers for these technologies.In addition to laying a foundation for future work in this area, this research serves as a prototypical example of using Value Sensitive Design to explicate the underlying human values in complex security domains.

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