We live in a platform society. What we do online is immediately shared within a lucrative global data ecology and managing our “privacy settings” does not impact on data privacy. So how can we expect children to take responsibility for their privacy online or understand data commercialisation and profiling? Sonia ...more

Society has high hopes and considerable fears for the digital future. On the one hand, parents are told – get your children coding so they have the digital skills needed for a competitive future. On the other hand, they are old - millions of jobs will be lost to digital ...more

Parents are full of questions about the digital future: What’s good or bad technology? What helps or hinders their child and when? These are not easy questions to answer, and our society is struggling with them. Following her TED Talk and Good Thinking podcast, Professor Sonia Livingstone discusses the evolution of parental ...more

Sonia Livingstone discusses the potential consequences of families’ reliance on technology during the COVID-19 crisis. She concludes that life under lockdown has the potential to either hasten a digital future in which our lives are tracked and monetised in unprecedented ways, or make the public more aware of such risks ...more

For Safer Internet Day 2020, a new report, EU Kids Online 2020: Survey results from 19 countries, has mapped the risks and opportunities of the internet for children in Europe. For the report, researchers from the EU Kids Online network collaborated between autumn 2017 and summer 2019 to conduct a major ...more

Previously we’ve shared some of our findings from our research with parents, educators, and children while we visited hands-on makerspaces through the San Francisco Bay Area as part of the Horizon 2020 funded international research project Makerspaces in Early Years (MakEY). To bring this series of posts to a close, we ...more

In the third of four posts presenting findings from the Makerspaces in the early years (MakEY) final report, Sonia Livingstone, Alicia Blum-Ross, and Paige Mustain discuss why, despite claims of “tech-free” parenting among tech-elite parents, they are eager to benefit from makerspaces provided for young children.  There has been a rising trend among tech elites of ...more

What do children know, and want to know, about where their data goes? The Children’s Data and Privacy Online project, funded by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), recently launched its final report and an online privacy toolkit at a multistakeholder seminar at LSE. LSE’s Gianfranco Polizzi and Professor Sonia Livingstone explain the project’s key research findings and recommendations. We ...more

In the second of four posts presenting findings from the Makerspaces in the early years (MakEY) final report, Sonia Livingstone, Alicia Blum-Ross, and Paige Mustain investigate how educators view parents roles within these spaces, and how the physical set up of the spaces encourage parents' interaction.  In our previous post wrapping up our findings from the ...more

            In today’s increasingly datafied and society, there is mounting pressure on schools to teach children about online privacy and safety. Yet the rapid pace of technological development, and limited opportunities for in-service training means this is often a daunting task for teachers. In this post, Sonia Livingstone, Mariya Stoilova and Rishita Nandagiri, describe ...more