Teaching a class in civics to people who are in their mid-teens.
There is going to be an element on privacy and relating it to democracy. Problem is, I am legitimately at a loss as to how to teach it. Getting people, much less teens, to understand or care is difficult. Does anybody have any suggestions for how to teach this?
There is no freedom without privacy. I would talk about the chilling effect of censorship which resulted in the Chinese âwhite paper protests.â Banning privacy is a mechanism for control.
But why is control bad?
Thatâs the question. Teens view themselves as fundamentally controlled by school and society. Oh, so life continues on as normal? They arenât keen on protesting. They already arenât allowed to go out and party. The Man controls what they do. So why should this be any different?
Boy, where to begin?
I think your first step is find examples to relate to them and their lives first. And then find stories and examples (real life) where you can explicitly explain the consequences of not having privacy - the bad stuff. Ask them for their banking info, their parents info, etc. to see how many share them for you to do anything you want with it. Then explain this with the need for needing to safeguard info as you want and to the extent you want while relating it to consent.
Also, research this forum on what privacy means and why its important. This forum and the blog has enough for you to start and you can go down the rabbit hole from here. That should give you examples and ideas to how best to teach your class while relating to them given the culture/language, etc. of your students.
I think maybe itâs easier to talk about it using feeling as in how gross it is for someone to know about you more than yourself.
Or maybe use irl specific example like "Would you borrow me your phone unlocked? " or âwould you use toilet with open door?â
Read any books on revolutions, authoritarianism, etc. History and history books will teach a lot. Thatâs really it.. for the most part at-least.
Open societies thrive with new ideas and experiments. Closed societies and ideologies keep the people down and are inherently not progressive. If regression is all one wants, there are still countries where you can go and live as you want then. And before people point out China and their advancements - an outlier doesnât make my argument invalid. Also, thatâs still too high a price to pay for not having true freedom. My opinion.
I would probably look to Weapons of Math Destruction at least as a starting point. Kids are constantly surrounded by social media algorithms and may not have thought about how their data can be used to manipulate their own ideas and opinions. This book speaks to that and other ways in which personal data is directly used against people in the modern world in a very concrete way (e.g. in the context of college admissions, hiring, insurance, etc).
There is a difference between parents or teachers acting in a childâs best interest versus the state putting them in interment camps. Australia did that with COVID patients. China welded apartment building doors shut. They use drones to identify anyone burning coal to survive the winter. A government which doesnât allow privacy doesnât have your best interests at heart. If you freeze to death, who cares? Governmnnt censores can erase you from history.
Ask them for their banking info, their parents info, etc.
"Would you borrow me your phone unlocked? " or âwould you use toilet with open door?â
In my personal experience trying to get people to care about privacy and security, examples like these are most effective. Where Iâm from you only need your date of birth and your address as additional information to your full name to change your 2FA Banking when your under 18.
As other people have said, ask them for stuff they understand, ask for a picture of their ID, bank information, ask them to read out their last chat messages in front of the class, to share their most recent picture with everyone in the room.
Most people think that they are not important enough to care or think that big tech already has everything about them but donât know that they can actually control how much data actually gets out there.
Tell them you have a USB stick capable of reading unencrypted data on any computer. Request volunteers. Boot Linux to demonstrate what you can view without entering a password.
Hereâs an excellent TED talk by Glenn Greenwald from before his expiration date
Oh my that is something to encounter indeed
I think you should check out where that surveillance as a business model was warned which was in the book, which will cover the common threat model your students are likely to face
[I apologize for the Amazon link, if thereâs a way to show it instead let me know, I guess I do like that it has a preview though to better understand]
For folks who want to buy from a better place:
When I want to relate to people, I think presenting concrete realities of how their Privacy is already invaded today is a compelling way to grab attention, especially as we now have concrete ways in which we can demonstrate how this hinders free speech today. I really like how Corey Doctorow has approached this in his book Enshittification, not just from a perspective of how no Privacy means no democracy, but how those translate to every day freedoms like choosing software like how to run games and support game developers who made a awesome game you love. Also, kids will love a good book with potty language on the front. Not sure if your school can recommend it.
I also liked this exchange between Moxie Marlinspike and Joe Rogan because Moxie is cued to introduce why Signal was required in a world full of end to end encrypted messaging. Why not just use Apple? Well you have to explain shortcoming with SMS and iOS messaging incompatibility. Why not WhatsApp? Well you have to explain incentives with surveillance capitalism and why Meta might not have your best interest. Then the big one that youâre trying to explain, why do you have to care about privacy so much if you have nothing to hide? I think this dialogue between Moxie and Joe answers those questions in a natural way. I think Joe asking on behalf of his younger and less technically literate users and probably genuine curiosity is a very quotable exchange regarding this topic for the first 30 min. I havenât really heard Moxie cater his vision for signal to the less technical crowd like this and I wish he had the opportunity to do this more.
The conversation goes in a bunch of other random directions and unfortunately people tend to cite this episode not for the educational moments but some small 30 second awkward moment between Moxie and Joe 
.
Anyways watch the first 30 min for ideas and maybe you could clip together some bits.
You canât force them to care but you can inform them about what tools they have at their disposal and how they might be releasing information to more people than they realize. For example, when you make a public social media post, everyone can see it, not just your friends, and it will stick around forever.
The most important thing is to get them to think about privacy in terms of a controlled release of information: how do you make sure only the people you want get the data you want them to get. A great example is E2EE messaging. Only the intended recipients can read the messages. Privacy isnât about never releasing any information ever, itâs about having control over where your data goes. I think the misconception that you canât have any data go anywhere or itâs not private has done a lot of damage and turns people off of privacy in general.
Hello, I teach political theory and philosophy and comment on things about IT and privacy, although itâs not my field.
Itâs important to teach the concepts of Law, rights, Rule of Law, and democracy. Privacy is a human right, and itâs not because it fell from the sky or because any random person decided it: itâs proven. To preserve peopleâs freedom, the freedom of action of all citizens is limited by the freedom of other citizens (your freedom ends where mine begins). From this arise a bunch of legal and philosophical concepts, including consent. Obviously forcing a person to talk or have sexual relations with you is a crime, because youâre violating their freedom, etc. The same thing happens with privacy. In what way have you given your consent to be identified? For them to be able to access any of your data? Moreover, even if you give them your consent by accepting the terms and conditions, should it really be allowed? Should it be permitted for a person to be able to sell an organ for money when finding themselves in a situation of poverty? The problem is consent and freedom.
Privacy is a human right, beyond the pragmatic questions that your students can also come to understand: ânow you live in a democracy, but what happens if in 20 years a dictatorship arrives and has all the data about you at its disposal?â Which can also be useful for seeing possible dark scenarios.
On the other hand, itâs important that they reflect on the following: no one can enter our house without invitation either, but they can with a court order and go through all our belongings. Do they have the same right with our personal data? Should it be preserved?
In this last case I find myself facing a duality. On one hand I think that no country has achieved a perfect Rule of Law (separation of powers, rule of law, national sovereignty, etc.) nor completely healthy democracies, so citizens have to have resources to defend themselves from a possible authoritarian government (present or future). On the other hand, I think that if law and justice governed in a country, the government and its coercive forces should have the right to access citizensâ data.
Sorry. I just looked up a phrase I had written down because I find it very powerful and spot-on. It doesnât hurt to remember the following, said by Snowden if I recall correctly:
Arguing that you donât care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you donât care about free speech because you have nothing to say.
Seems like there are two questions implicit in OP.
Always meet kids where theyâre at. As a general rule of thumb, you should not expect them to have both a nuanced and an internalized opinion on complex topics. Itâs either one or the other, and your job is to help them with both wherever they are at. For example, ask a kid âShould women have abortion rights?â or âShould the US help Ukraine?â and they will have an opinion that is either grounded in sentiment, emotion, group identity, cultural identity, etc. (i.e., internalized), or grounded in an argument that they are merely repeating from some source or authority (i.e., nuance). When first starting out with an unfamiliar topic, itâs usually one or the other.
In a course like mathematics, the goal would be to provide nuance to the kids first. For example: the order of operations, what operations do and mean, etc. Only after this should the answers they give to a math questions be internalized. Nuance first, internalization second.
However, on the topic of social sciences, you should meet them where theyâre at by letting them have internalized opinions first. It is only after this that you teach them nuance by, for example, providing the prevailing arguments for their internalized opinions. Internalization first, nuance second.
After this, itâs back-and-forth with giving them increasingly complex nuances. When you give them an argument that they can then use to defend their originally internalized opinion, challenge it with a counterargument. This will have one of two effects: (a) it will change their opinion, or (b) it will force them to critically think on how to argue against that counterargument.
As you give increasingly more nuance to increasingly more positions, you cultivate their cognitive abilities. You are essentially training them to think âshould I have this opinion or that opinion?â and providing them the tools to justify their opinions/thinking process in the form of arguments.
All of this starts with meeting them where theyâre at. If you simply start off with nuance (i.e., if you simply start off with telling them that privacy is important because so-and-so says so, or because this book or that podcast has good arguments for it, or because itâs vital for democracy and freedom, etc.) they will fall asleep as if it were a math class. Meeting them where theyâre at allows them to be proactive in their learning. Proactivity in learning is essential. Being forced to learn is as good as dogma. As a teacher, you are not handing out dogma. You are preparing the next generation of doctors, writers, artists, scientists, and privacy advocates, etc.
The aim of this question is to get kids to pay attention to what youâre teaching and seek out learning for themselves. In essence, it is about getting kids to think about a particular topic in the same way they think about what the best shopping mall is or which basket ball player is the best or which MCU movie is the best, etc.
Questions of those kinds are such that if you were to ask them it, they would likely be intently deliberating. And if they had the cognitive tools, they would even justify their answers. âMcDonaldâs has the best friesâ, or âLeBron has the most points in NBA historyâ, or âInfinity War was the most memorableâ, etc.
The goal is to have them mirror their cognitive processes with these questions when answering complex social questions. How is this achieved?
The reason why kids are able to afford so much cognitive effort to answering those simple questions is because it is intimately tied to their social lives and the lives of their peers. Having an opinion on this subject matters to them. Therefore, to make kids care about a particular topic like privacy, make their opinions matter somehow. Now, getting kids to truly care about some particular topic is going to be impossible, but the goal isnât necessarily to have them âcareâ about it. Using the terminology from the previous section above, this question is actually just about making them have an internalized opinion.
Mathematics teachers are famous for doing this. They point out the everyday maths that hide behind the normal daily activities of life. A kid that goes to math class and gets asked a math question is probably not going to care about what their answer is, outside of having a good grade. But if that teacher has a good teacher-student relationship with them, the student will feel an obligation or responsibility to learn and get the correct answer. Genuine interest the going-ons in their lives is vital. Students will be more likely to reciprocate. You cannot teach a student well if you do not know them well. Teaching is personalized in virtue of the relationships that are built, even when you are in a class environment.
Being enthusiastic will also show kids that this stuff matters. You lead by example. Not much to say here.
Additionally, you can further make their opinions matter through artificial means. The previous advice above was about non-artificial means: their internalized opinions matter organically because it is genuinely relevant to their daily lives. But making opinions artificially matter is about what goes on in the classroom. If they have an opinion or position about the topic of privacy, have them gather with others of the same opinion/position. Make various groups debate other groups of opposing sides. That way, internalizing an opinion becomes artificially necessary throughout class time.
This is why papers are a go-to project. It forces students to internalize an opinion âartificiallyâ (and consequently defend it through nuanced justification).
This isnât specific to privacy, itâs way too vague and it reads like AI output or like itâs copy/pasted from Wikipedia or something.
True, I got carried away.
No, I just like writing. Iâll try to tone down the AI-ness in future posts i guess. FWIW, I did background research before answering OPâs question. Maybe thatâs why it sounds like itâs from Wikipedia/AI? Because Wikipedia/AI uses the same public sources of the internet.
I donât appreciate my post being labelled AI because (1) itâs specifically against the rules, so you are claiming Iâm breaking the rules without evidence; and (2) this could have been handled in PMs, or you could have flagged my post. Also, as an active member of a community, it is embarrassing to be called out as an AI user, especially by a team member whose posts tend to hold weight over others.
I dont think itâs too vague. Itâs certainly abstract, but abstract does not mean vague. You can apply abstract rules to concrete situations in virtue of the fact that abstracts are derived from a multitude of concretes. A JPEG of an abstract tree is not the same as a JPEG of something that is vaguely a tree. One (abstraction) helps you identify the nature of a tree and its essential parts and is derived from many instances of a tree, while the other (vagueness) is confusing. I donât think my post was at all confusing, at least in its intention.
Additionally, the reason why it is abstract in the first place is because thatâs part of the implicit question I was referring to. The answer to what the best teaching method is, and how to get kids to âcareâ about a school subject, is going to be abstract and will apply to many different school subjects and scenarios, not just privacy. Itâs supposed to be grounded in the real fact that teenagers do not care much about what they are being taught. The post aims to address this specifically, and in doing so, the specificity of privacy diminishes.