Co-Design Privacy Notice and Controls with Children

Abstract

Children, as digital natives, face increasing privacy risks and are required to make numerous privacy decisions daily. However, existing privacy notice and privacy controls mainly focus on adult users, remaining challenging for children, who may lack the literacy and developmental maturity to make informed decisions. To empower children to manage their privacy, it is essential to create accessible, comprehensible, and context-appropriate privacy notice and control designs. To fill the gap, we conducted a four-day co-design workshop with five children (ages 8-11). We uncovered children’s critical challenges in current privacy notice and control, such as information overload, unclear terminology, and insufficient contextual or causal explanations. The findings reveal children’s specific needs and expectations across key dimensions, including modality, timing, channel, and the types and functionality of privacy control. Based on these insights, we propose design implications to enhance children’s ability to make informed privacy decisions and support their digital autonomy.