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Safety vs. Surveillance: What Children Have to Say about Mobile Apps for Parental Control

Published: 19 April 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Mobile applications ("apps") developed to promote online safety for children are underutilized and rely heavily on parental control features that monitor and restrict their child's mobile activities. This asymmetry in parental surveillance initiates an interesting research question -- how do children themselves feel about such parental control apps? We conducted a qualitative analysis of 736 reviews of 37 mobile online safety apps from Google Play that were publicly posted and written by children (ages 8-19). Our results indicate that child ratings were significantly lower than that of parents with 76% of the child reviews giving apps a single star. Children felt that the apps were overly restrictive and invasive of their personal privacy, negatively impacting their relationships with their parents. We relate these findings with HCI literature on mobile online safety, including broader literature around privacy and surveillance, and outline design opportunities for online safety apps.

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References

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '18: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2018
    8489 pages
    ISBN:9781450356206
    DOI:10.1145/3173574
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    Published: 19 April 2018

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    1. adolescents
    2. mobile online safety
    3. parental control apps

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    • (2024)Labeling in the Dark: Exploring Content Creators’ and Consumers’ Experiences with Content Classification for Child Safety on YouTubeProceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3643834.3661565(1518-1532)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
    • (2024)Porous by Design: How Childcare Platforms Impact Worker Personhood, Safety, and ConnectionProceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3643834.3661552(1336-1349)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
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