A new project! I want to get more into communication, teaching and explaining, as this is something I enjoy a lot. Therefore I took up an offer to talk about one of the topics that I am passionate about: Online Privacy. This will be cute, as it is something called a Childrens University. Classes of school children will come to the uni and people with backgrounds in science will tell them about their work and research in a child-friendly way.

In a couple weeks, I will hold two lectures there. For this, I need to develop a nice class on online privacy, that I would have wanted to listen to as a child. I set myself the following goal:

Let’s jump right into it!

What am I working with?

Here are some hard facts I gathered about the event:

• There will be 70 - 90 kids per lecture, in ages 10 and 11.
• There will be two lectures of 45 minutes each.
• It should answer a question that curious kids might have
• It should be as interactive as possible (suggested are quizzes, experiments, material)
• There will be the basic infrastructure of a lecture hall

This is the project title and description, that I have provided earlier:

Title: Your family knows you well, but the internet knows you even better – why is that?
Description: When I go on YouTube, there are videos on my favourite topics. Spotify knows my favourite music. Google Maps knows where I was yesterday, where I am now, and where I’ll probably be tomorrow. How do they know that? And what else do they know? Spoiler alert: much more than you think. Come with me on a journey to discover how the internet works and how it came to be that people on the other side of the world probably know more about you than your parents do.

So I think the main question I want to answer is: Why the internet wants to know so much about you, and why this is concerning? This will be quite challenging, as this revoles a lot about the topic of privacy, which is quite abstract.

But what is the main point I want to convey? If they go home and the parents ask what they took away from it, what should they remember? I would say this should be the following: I should be super careful in the internet, everything I do there is like doing it in public. I am realizing that this is actually not an answer to the question, but it is more important.

Lets think about a rough outline

45 minutes is not much. Let’s assume some kids will come late and there will be some downtime because of technical issues or my introduction, this will be more like 40 or 35 minutes of content. So how should this be structured?

I think I am happy with this outline for a first draft.

Collecting ideas and methods

As the next step, I collected methods and ideas for the lecture. Here I used my own experience and references, and also asked the french AI Le Chat for some ideas.

Here are my favourites from this brain storming session:

• Doing a sociogram in the beginning, so I can get to know the kids and their behaviour, as well as they getting a picture of the kids in the room.
• Enter the subject with a hypothetical story: Someone reading a diary of someone else and finding out intimate things. Then they might start to abuse this information.
• Structuring the main part of the lecture along the data exploitation life cycle: Data collection, Data Aggregation, Data Analysis, Data Exploitation. This could use a puzzle 🧩 metaphor.
• Giving them a handout in the end, that summarizes the main mental models and the main protective measures.
• Task to infer something about someone: Have some kind of task where I hand out letters, screen shots, profiles, etc. and the grous will try to infer from this. This could even be split into metadata (closed envelopes) and personal data (open letters).

Developing the content

📖 A story about information asymmetry and manipulation

Okay, let’s start maturing some ideas. Lets begin with the story. I want to use a tangible and simple story to convey the main mechanism of surveillance capitalism: Acquiring an information advantage over someone and then using this in a manipulative fashion. Let’s dive into it:

A boy is in love with his female friend. She is not really interested unfortunately and she did not really provide a reason. They are still friends and meeting every week. While visiting her place, he is waiting for her to come back from horse riding. She will still take a while. While waiting in her room, thinking about what to do, he finds her diary.
He decides to read the diary front to back and finds out a lot of intimate details about her that he did not know yet. That she loves the lead singer of BTS, she is afraid of lonelyness, she cannot understand how someone does not like horse riding, and she in fact wrote about him! Saying that she likes him, but she wished he would be more well dressed and stylish.
The boy really wants to be together with her and starts to take notes. About what she likes, what she wants of him, what she is afraid about. From this day on he slowly changes his behaviour: He dresses more stylish, acts as if he loves BTS, and starts to talk about horse riding.

Then I will ask, how the students feel about this. Would they feel okay with this situation? If they would be in her shoes, how would they feel?

This story should demonstrate a privacy violation, how an information asymmetry can be abused, often without the person even realising. And how manipulative it can be. I hope to use this as a tangible and easy entry to the topic. I would like to have some pictures or drawings supporting this story. But that it for later.

🖐️ Sociogram

A sociogram is a simple method of getting to know a group. A person is making a statement or sking a question and the group gives feedback visually or physically. If there is enough space to walk and roam around, physical locations in the room can represent yes and no and all the shades in between. Then the students walk around to show their stance on the topic. If walking is not option, a simple feedback can be given through raising their hand for a yes, or having red and green cards to show their opinion.

This will be good for three reasons: First, I can judge the room and get to know the kids. Secondly the kids will get to know some information about their group and whether they belong to the majority or minority. Lastly, it also serves as an ice breaker and to get started.

Here is a list of statements I might use:

• Getting started
  • I feel energetic today
  • I liked the day so far
• Relationship to tech
  • I have a phone
  • I used my phone today already
  • I am online at least once a week
  • I am online at least once a day
  • I have posted something online (comment, picture, text, etc.)
• Privacy
  • I have searched my name before
  • I share my location with apps sometimes
  • I have been tought how to be safe online
• Attitude
  • I feel safe when I am online
  • I feel like I have control over who sees my information online
  • I dont want that the internet knows much about me
  • I dont worry who sees what I do on the internet
• Algorithm
  • I am watching Youtube regularly
  • Youtube shows me things I like

I just got confirmed that there will indeed not be enough space to walk around for the students to position themselves on a scale. That means I have to use either hands as feedback, or e.g. red and green paper to show your opinion.

🧩 Structure of the content

As written above, I would like to structure this around the life cycle of personal data: gathering, aggregation, analysis, exploitation. I might use the metaphor of collecting puzzle pieces and then having a full picture. Here is a short summary of what to do per step.

Data Gathering (finding puzzle pieces)

The first step is gathering data about the users. This is like finding puzzle pieces about someone, or reading single pages of a diary. Here I think it is the main goal to show that all online activity will generate data. Or in other words “👣 You are leaving footprints”. Here, I want to theoretically create the understanding just how much traces or puzzle pieces are created here in the digital world.

Practical things to do here:

• Do a comparison of analogue and digital activities and the traces they leave.
• Give around analogue letters and post cards in the room. Let the students deduce information about the writers of these letters. Collect findings.
• Give people screen shots of chats, social profiles, pictures, etc. and let them deduce. Collect findings.

I like the idea of taking a hypothetical analogue life and we act as if we are the mail person that maliciously reads the letters ✉️.

In real life: This could be Whatsapp or Gmail.

Data Aggregation (collecting many puzzle pieces)

The next step is that all the actors who collect puzzle pieces sell these pieces for money or share it voluntarily. Or in other words: There are actors who go around and buy all the puzzle pieces from all the places and collect them. These aggregation would be companies like Google, Amazon or other data brokers.

This could be done using the metaphor of the analogue life of a person interacting with the world around them: They are writing mails, going shopping, going to the doctor, chatting in the café, going to the club. The mailman reads all the letters, the cashier notes down what was bought, the doctor takes a note about bad habits, the waitress in the café listens the gossip, etc. Then a bad person goes around and buys the data from all of them.

Active element: Not sure yet. Maybe it is okay not to have one.
In real life: The people around town are all digital apps and the bad actor is Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc.

Data Analysis (building the puzzle)

The next step is analyzing the data, or building the puzzle about you. In reality a company like Google will take all the individual data about you and start to look into them to see what conclusions it can get out of them. In the metaphor, the bad actor takes all the puzzle pieces about you and starts putting them together. This will not be a complete puzzle, it will have many holes and things missing, but it might still allow to conclude a lot!

Active Element: Here I could put up a “puzzle” of one person and let students figure even more things out about this person. E.g. a combination of shopping things and doctor will reveal a sickness, or a letter and a talk in the café will reveal something about the person.
In real life: This is e.g. Google combinding the data an running algorihms to make use of it.

That is why the internet knows more about you than your parents do
“These companies are creating diaries about you, everyone of you!”

Data Exploitation (using the puzzle)

The last step is making use of this information. In the scenario, we now assume that the bad actor compiled a full report on Lucy, with all things like activities, fears, hopes, location, etc. They will then take this All you need to know about Lucy report and try to sell it. Here I might ask the kids what they could imagine a person could do with this data? I will let them brainstorm for a moment. This could also be turned into a more active task by asking them to discuss with their neighbor how this data could be exploited.

My ideas:

• They might go to the newspaper with a list of topics that the person wants to hear (so she buys the paper)
• They go to the person running for mayor with a list of topics that the person wants to hear (so she votes for the mayor)
• They will go to the police and sell a list of wrongdoings
• They will go to the store with a list of things the person likes the most (so she buys more)

At this point, I could ask about how the kids would feel if this would happen. -> In a real village, this would be horrible! If everyone would spy on each other and you are being manipulated.

📝 Turning it into reality

Then next, this metaphor is transferred into reality. Briefly, all the steps are shown in the “digital village”, and their counterparts. Writing mails is using Whatsapp, going shopping is using Amazon, going to the doctor is googling health symptoms, chatting in the café is calling on Discord, going to the club is gaming.

Let’s summarize the situation:

1. Whatever you do online, you leave digital traces 👣
2. Most digital things (apps and webistes) actively collect these traces about you
   (🎥 The internet is watching / there is always a hidden audience)
3. Data collectors buy this data from all those digital places and collect them in a folder about you
   (🪙 Your data is valuable / data is the new currency)
4. They then generate a report about the person with all initmate details: “The full report on Leon”
   (🐘 The internet never forgets)
5. Then they sell this information to anyone willing to pay money for it
   (🕊️ Sharing releases control)
6. Things you interact with are changed based on your profile, to have higher chances of changing your behaviour
   (🥷 Bad things will happen, 🌍 It has real effects)

The data brokers actually have complied reports on you, your habits, feelings, fears, location, etc. And they are actually selling it to the highest bidder. This is at this time mostly used for advertisement and software optimization. These are either ads that are so good that you click on them, or e.g. youtube and tiktok algorithms to be more addictive because they give you exactly what you like. In fact, many digital services feed you things to keep you on the platforms to waste your time.

And it has real life effects:

• You are more addicted to digital services as they feed you what you make you stay
• You will see more controversial and conspiratorial content
• Societies are more divided as everyone hears what they want to hear
• Elections are changed because voters are being manipulated
• Banks make decisions if they should give you money based on your report

🩹 What can we do about it

The next and probably last segment should turn the awareness of the problem into action -> Now that we fully understand the problem, what can we do?

Revised schedule

As the next step, I feel like revising the schedule based on the content that I developed.

Okay, this feels more conrete and fleshed out.

Creating the slides

As the next step, I started to create some slides. They will be actually very minimal and most of the content will be done through me talking. Here is an example of how the slide of the opening story currently looks:

As I build most of the content around the metaphor of a village, I then started sketching. It is hard to find the right balance of quick sketch and a nice aestetic, but I landed with these two in the end. If I get more time, I will draw nicer versions.

As the next step, I will create a personality profile of a fictional person. Then this will be translated in activity and hints for the students to guess.

The next days were quite an intense and non-linear process, where I went back and forth and reiterated the slides and the content multiple times. I departed from my intended structure of data gathering, collection, etc. as it did not seem like the best option anymore. In the end I chose to stronlgy develop a fictitious village called “Musterhausen” in a time before digital things. Inside the town lives our main character Kim. I developed a whole personality profile for Kim, with secrets, habits, and facts. I then translated them into concrete data traces across the town (receipts, health records, observation notes). Inside this metaphorical story, I chose the following structure for the main content:

1. Chapter 1: A look into the mail: Here I looked together with the whole class into the physical mailbox of Kim and checked what we can find out about Kim’s life. I showed multiple example enveloped and parcels and we deduced together. The main outcomes were: you leave traces, data reveals much more about you than you might think, the difference between data (letter) and metadata (envelope), and you do not need to read the data to already find out a lot.
2. Chapter 2: The Spies of Musterhausen: Then I made the scope bigger and asked how much we could find out, if we did not only look into the mail, but rather into all different places of the city: The receipt of the supermarket, the list of borrowed books from the library. This was an exercise, where I handed out Kim’s traces across the town, and then we built a personality profile with those insights together at the front.
3. Chapter 3: The Spies of the Internet: In the last chapter, I transferred this metaphor into reality. The cute town of Musterhausen turned into a digital town, where the mail service became Whatsapp and the library became Google Search, etc. Here I briefly explained the business model of surveillance capitalism using simple images and slides.

Summary

I held the lecture yesterday and it was really nice. It was a nice opportunity to speak in front of 150 kids and it made me happy to speak about a topic I care about and to speak in a way that I like and is easily accessible. I could really see that the strong metaphorical and story-telling focus of the lecture worked like a charm: The moment I started with the opening story and speaking like a narrator, even the active kids listened closely. The 45 minutes are not remotely enough to teach about this topic, but I think given the time frame, I gave them some clear images and mental models to chew on for a while. And to me, those are the best kinds of teaching.

There are a lot of things I learned from it. E.g. two days ago, I was wondering if I really manage to fill the 45 minutes with enough content. In reality, I was much slower than anticipated (I did it very interactively and asked a lot of questions, and this takes more time than anticipated). Here is a short list of things I learned:

• Interaction takes time
• It is good to repeat and reiterate things
• It is good to summarize learnings
• Metaphors are good, but leave enough time to properly transfer it into reality
• More time on the exercise would have been good, the more is done by the students, the better

There is something to teaching I really like. I have had countless times in my life where I was sitting in a class, either thinking I could do it better than the teacher, or admiring the great teaching skills, wondering if I could to this too. It gave me great joy yesterday to try myself at this and captivating 150 kids with this topic. I should do more teaching in the future :)

Ah, and by the way: I absolutely did not meet my goal of taking only 10 hours for this. In the end, I needed three times as much. While this was a bit much during some days, I did enjoy most of the process. And maybe I can recycle some of this work for future teaching projects!

But now I am done with this project and it needs to be celebrated! 🎉