In today’s class, we covered different components of online citizenship: privacy, cyberbullying, consent, and digital safety.

What I found most interesting about today’s course content was the concept of browser fingerprinting and data brokers as it relates to the common myth that our cell phones are listening to our every move. Though I have learned about browser fingerprinting and implications of sharing location and search data in the past, I was not aware of the precise methods through which targeted ads or personalized data were gathered, nor did I have a good grasp on how to change these settings on an iPhone or avoid browser fingerprinting on my laptop.

Moving forward, I think this is an important lesson to be discussing with adolescents in middle and high schools, given the fact that almost 99% of teens (ages 15-24) in recent years have established an online presence, interact with social media sites (Statistics Canada, 2022). In my future classroom, I hope to be able to briefly cover some digital literacy surrounding security and privacy prior to encouraging my students to conduct research and build projects online. I also think the simple activity of googling yourself like we did in class today can help students realize how public they have made themselves online.

On a personal level, I currently use Google Chrome and will consider switching to a shielded browser such as Brave of Firefox, to prevent tracking and fingerprinting of my work, in addition to keeping my iPhone settings toggled off tracking for individual apps (I had already set it this way). Overall, I found today’s lesson was a very helpful expansion on my current knowledge, and encouraged me to consider the ways through which I will need to communicate this to my students.

Images for today’s post were obtained from UnSplash.