The Common Sense Privacy Risks and Harms report identifies risks to children and students as they engage online and identifies ways for parents and educators to choose the products that best protect our youngest consumers from privacy intrusions and manipulation by third parties that could have long-term implications.
These decisions by parents and educators on which products to use at home and in the classroom need to be guided by resources backed by research and experts with informed analysis of the risks. Our easy-to-understand privacy evaluations from Common Sense include an overall score, display tier risks, and summarize privacy concerns to guide parents and educators in making informed choices. Information and communication technologies offer tremendous benefits to children, especially the most disadvantaged, but parents and educators need to be able to harness the power of the technology while at the same time limiting the harms in order to protect children. As parents, educators, and consumers, our main leverage in encouraging companies to make changes in how they collect and use personal information from kids is in our purchasing decisions, by us only buying products for kids that protect their privacy and avoiding products that do not.
With this report, we collect the best available information about ways consumers can arm themselves with information when choosing which technology tools to use. There is no one-size-fits-all solution for privacy, and so parents and teachers need to educate themselves with resources like ours and those offered by other trusted sources in order to best understand how to minimize the risk of harms to our youngest consumers based on the personal information collected from them, who has access to it, and how it is used.