Digital, AI & Creative Skills
Privacy And Digital Footprints
This lesson helps students understand digital footprints and privacy choices. They check what information is shared and create safer habits.
What you will learn
- Understand that almost every action you take online is recorded somewhere, and that your digital footprint is much larger than most people realise.
- Understand the different parties who can access your digital footprint (the app itself, advertisers, data brokers, attackers, and governments) and what each kind of access means.
- Learn how to check the privacy settings on a real account, identify at least three things you can change to reduce your footprint, and understand why the default settings are usually not the most private.
- Combine the footprint understanding, the access awareness, and the settings audit into a one page Privacy Checklist covering the student's own accounts, settings, and habits.
What happens in this lesson
Chapter 1: What Is A Digital Footprint?
Understand that almost every action you take online is recorded somewhere, and that your digital footprint is much larger than most people realise.
What you make: A saved footprint note listing five specific things you did online yesterday and identifying which ones probably produced data stored on someone else's server.
Chapter 2: Who Has Access?
Understand the different parties who can access your digital footprint (the app itself, advertisers, data brokers, attackers, and governments) and what each kind of access means.
What you make: A saved access note naming at least three different parties who could plausibly have some access to the data produced by one specific app the student uses.
Chapter 3: Check Your Settings
Learn how to check the privacy settings on a real account, identify at least three things you can change to reduce your footprint, and understand why the default settings are usually not the most private.
What you make: A saved settings audit for one specific account, listing the current privacy settings and at least three changes the student could make to reduce their footprint.
Chapter 4: Privacy Checklist
Combine the footprint understanding, the access awareness, and the settings audit into a one page Privacy Checklist covering the student's own accounts, settings, and habits.
What you make: A saved Privacy Checklist covering at least three accounts, key settings to check on each one, and three habits the student will adopt for future apps.
Chapter 5: Privacy Tradeoffs And Smart Choices
Evaluate privacy choices in realistic situations and decide when to reduce data, when to keep a feature, and how to justify the tradeoff.
What you make: A saved privacy decision log for one real app or service, showing one tradeoff, the choice made, the reason for it, and one alternative the learner rejected.
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