Safety vs. Privacy in the Mobile Parenting Technology

Even though I don’t have to worry about this now, in less than 12 years my son will become a teenager. At that point I will join the parenting crowd in trying to find ways to ensure my child’s safety without compromising his privacy. Considering that the world around us is turning more and more mobile, and it’s becoming impossible to find a phone that just makes phone calls, the idea of a mobile phone application that assists in parenting a teenager sounds less and less fictional.

To be honest, I would not be talking about this now if I did not come across an interesting paper on the subject. The authors conducted interviews with several teens and their parents and, based on their responses, provide guidelines for designing secure and private mobile phone safety technologies. The questions discussed include the kinds of data to collect, as well as when and whom to notify.

One of the interesting and possibly unexpected things that came out of the interviews is the kind of data the parents want and the teens are willing to share. For example, both teenagers and their parents agreed that mood is too private to share with anyone, unlike exact address of location, transportation type, destination, and the names of companions. In addition, the kids are more willing to share various types of information if they are notified when the other party accesses information about them. Both teens and their parents are reluctant to share any information with the government, however their views disagree on whether teenager’s friends should have access to the data – parents feel a lot more reluctant about it than their kids do.

Based on the observations drawn from the analysis of the interviews, the authors of the paper then proceed to make several technical recommendations for the design of future parent-teen mobile safety technologies. For example, they suggest separate encryption pathways for different types of data, as well as multi-party decryption for the data that need to be accessed when, for example, multiple parties must work together during a teen’s disappearance.

It pleases me to see that this type of research is being conducted proactively rather than after-the-fact. There is hope that the developers of these new types of mobile applications will take suggestions from security researchers into consideration when designing new technologies. As for the code of these applications, there are always solutions like those provided by Fortify to assist in making sure that the implementation adheres to the design.