Your household has one tablet or computer on the countertop that is used not only by you but also by your children and their grandparents. In case you’ve ever let your child play games or watch cartoons on your phone in a car, it now belongs to at least six applications, and no one knows whose account it belongs to.
If this situation sounds familiar, protecting your children’s privacy on shared devices becomes more challenging. You may not want to install parental controls on your own phone or block certain websites and apps, but you still want to prevent strangers from accessing your children’s location or apps from creating a profile of your nine-year-old.
By the end of this article, you’ll learn how to protect the privacy of your children on the devices that you already have in the family.
Why Using One Device by Several People Is Harmful
A device used by one person is rather predictable in its activity – this person checks email, uses several applications for work and/or entertainment, and doesn’t have any problems with their privacy.
The same device shared among the whole family will create many problems related to privacy because the device will accumulate the activity of several people – you will use it for work-related things, your children will use it to entertain themselves, and perhaps your grandparents will use it to make a video call with their friends.
As children use their devices, they save passwords, browser history, location data, and many other personal details. If an app begins collecting that information, it could put your children’s privacy at risk.
This issue is more relevant today than it was a decade ago because kids start to use connected devices earlier, use them for longer periods of time, and also use various types of these devices. Educational, streaming, voice assistant, and social platform apps want to know who exactly uses them and what the users do.
Setting Up Profiles for Everyone in Your Family
The best way to protect the privacy of your kids is to create profiles for everyone in your family – you and your children. The device allows you to create different user profiles or at least separate app-level accounts.
Creating a profile for your child has many advantages – firstly, it helps you to organize their activity separately from yours, and it means that an app won’t treat your child’s behavior as your behavior. Secondly, you will be able to apply age-appropriate settings for your child that will be preserved until they change them, unlike the default ones that reset each time you use your device.
If you use an OS for mobile phones or a computer that supports parental or child account creation, use them instead of the default settings. The default settings are supposed to be broadly acceptable, and they don’t correspond to the needs of your family.
Reviewing Application Permissions
Kids install new apps very quickly and don’t read anything before doing it. It is crucial to know why a drawing app asks for access to your contacts and a game asks for your exact location. You can discuss these issues with your kid rather than solving them only yourself.
Spend some time (for example, several times per year) checking the permissions list of apps that are installed on the device. Don’t try to lecture your child and discuss this process in a casual manner – it is the same as cleaning a backpack.
Some things you should pay attention to in this process are:
- Apps that have access to the camera, microphone, and location, and whether these permissions are required or not.
- Which accounts are logged in on the device and whether there are any active subscriptions.
Such discussions also help teach your child how to check this information independently as they become older.
Teaching Kids to Think Before Sharing Personal Information
There are technical settings that protect your children, and there is something else you need to do – teach your children what they shouldn’t tell anyone.
Fortunately, scaring your children won’t help you. It is easier to teach your children how to behave in this situation as a habit. Teach your children not to share their full names, home addresses, school names, or photos that reveal identifiable details.
Little kids will appreciate simple rules – don’t type personal details anywhere without asking adults for help. Older kids and teenagers will need a more complex approach – you can explain to them how apps and sites use the collected information and why a game or quiz that asks for personal information is not really free.
Securing Your Network
Protection of the privacy of your kids on shared devices is not only about the device itself – you need to take care of the network that your device uses to communicate with the web. If you haven’t changed the default password of your router, it is quite easy to gain access to your network and your device.
Change the password of your router to something non-default, use a strong password for the router, and always update its firmware. Modern routers allow you to create a guest network that is useful when you want your guests to have access to Wi-Fi but don’t want strangers to use your household’s main network.
Some families prefer to use additional protection for the connection of the devices their kids use the most. In this case, you can use a VPN software that provides encryption of the connection between your device and the internet.
It is especially useful for devices that your kids use in schools, cafes, and while traveling. Public networks are easy to use and convenient, but they are also places where someone can easily spy on your traffic.Your family may not need a virtual private network (VPN), but you can add one for extra protection if your children use their devices outside the home.
Browsing and Search History Protection
Search engines and browsers collect information about your interests, habits, and queries, and on a shared device, this history is a mixture of everyone’s history. It is bad for privacy and accuracy because it means that autocomplete and ads show something that confuses a user.
Enable a kid-friendly search mode and create a separate browser profile for your child so their browsing history stays separate from the history of adult users. You should also clear saved searches regularly and review the information saved in the browser’s autofill settings.
You should do the same for voice assistants – they save voice recordings and search queries by default, and you should check these settings from time to time.
Discussing Privacy With Them as They Grow Older
As your kids grow older, the privacy settings become more sophisticated, and discussions about these settings should change too.Five-year-old children do not need to understand what data brokers are, but parents should teach their twelve-year-old son or daughter how companies collect and use their personal data.
Consider these talks as something ongoing rather than a one-time event – as your children grow up, they will become more independent, and you will have to discuss these settings with them and allow them to make more decisions on their own with your help.
It will also be useful if you show them how to take care of their privacy. They will see how you react to the privacy settings of each application.
Wrapping Up
Using one device by several members of your family is inevitable, and to be honest, it is the most practical solution for many families. Buying devices for each person in your family is unreasonable and unnecessary. The main idea is to create several habits that can help reduce the privacy risks of your children – separate profiles, checking permissions, a secure network, and discussions of privacy that change as your kids become older.
None of these steps requires a lot of time, and you can do one step per week starting from this article. Small and regular actions help to create a safe environment for the people who use this device.