This was first published in the Guernsey Press on 2 October 2023.
Data Protection Commissioner Emma Martins reflects on how to raise awareness and engagement with meaning and relevance, particularly for younger members of our community.
We have been running a schools outreach programme for some time now. This programme is vital to our work because we have a statutory duty to raise awareness of the data protection law, to ensure organisations are aware of their responsibilities, and individuals, especially children and young people, are aware of their rights.
It is also important because we do, I think, have a moral duty to help everyone better understand the critical importance of data in our lives.
Raising awareness may perhaps sound simple. In reality that is not the case.
Unlike many other kinds of regulation, data protection is relevant for every organisation and every individual on these Islands, without exception.
How, then, do we go about raising that awareness and engagement in a way that actually has meaning and relevance?
There is of course no one answer. Across our community we have very different audiences and children are, perhaps, one of the most challenging to engage with effectively and meaningfully.
Data protection has the reputation of being a dry topic. I hope that recent events have started to chip away at that preconception (for example there have been a number of significant data breaches in the UK and Northern Ireland, and also a lot of discussion around AI).
We are getting better at understanding that it is fundamentally about how we are treated and how we treat each other.
Our lives are increasingly reliant upon, and influenced by, data - data that we produce and that is produced about us. What happens to our data, happens to us.
As adults, we are well able to see, and make sense of, the headlines about AI, data breaches and cyber threats. For the younger generation, those issues are likely to go under the radar.
And that is not ok, because issues of data and technology affect our children as much as they do adults – their parents and carers.
The age at which children are given access to smart devices is getting younger and younger. And where there are smart devices, there is data - lots of it.
Ensuring children are aware of the significance of our data hungry world, and how they are impacted by it, is important not only because it plays a part in helping them take steps to keep themselves and others safe, it also actively supports digital literacy.
Our young people are growing up in a digital world and when they enter the workplace as adults, they need the skills to do so successfully.
There is a critical need for ethical engagement as much as there is for technological skill. We want our children to have both.
Our schools programme has been carefully created by a trained teacher because we recognise that more ‘traditional’ communication methods used in data protection are unlikely to make a meaningful impact.
The programme includes sessions with the children where there are discussions around AI, fake news and healthy boundaries when sharing information online.
But for the younger children, we know that these concepts and issues may be challenging so our outreach officer came up with the idea of writing a short book aimed specifically at introducing the basic concepts of personal data and digital literacy.
Children learn so much about the world, its challenges and complexities, both good and bad, through storytelling. Why should data protection be any different?
The launch of our ‘homemade’ book was a wonderful experience for us all, but it is part of our schools outreach work which has a very serious side.
The extraordinary pace of change in our world is largely technologically driven. We are all impacted but some members of our community are likely to be more vulnerable to negative and long-term impacts than others.
Encouraging children and young people to take an interest and to understand the important role we all play in shaping our lives, present and future, is incumbent upon us all - whether we are parents, carers, teachers, regulators, politicians.
We were fortunate enough to interview the Principle of Ladies College, Daniele Harford-Fox, recently as part of Project Bijou. In her very powerful interview, Daniele highlights the challenges as well as the opportunities of technological advances.
She talks powerfully of the need for us all, as a community, to work collaboratively to understand the impact that technology has on us as humans and the impact it particularly has on children’s minds. There is a lot at stake.
I do not pretend that telling children stories is the only answer. But I do feel strongly that we need to think creatively, imaginatively, and positively about where there may be opportunities to engage those in our community who may not otherwise think it is something that matters to them.
Telling young children stories will, I hope, serve to pique their interest and help them to feel empowered as they grow up.
They will help shape our future and it is in all our interests that they do so with as much information and support as we can give them.
Data is increasingly our destiny. What happens to it matters more than it has ever mattered before, and the role it plays in shaping our lives will only increase.
We want to offer citizens of all ages as many opportunities as we can to. To educate is to empower and to engage is to care. None of us are bystanders.
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