Towards Collaborative Family-Centered Design for Online Safety, Privacy and Security
Mamtaj Akter, Zainab Agha, Ashwaq Alsoubai, Naima Ali, Pamela Wisniewski
TL;DR
This paper argues that traditional online safety tools often constrain teen privacy and invites a collaborative, family-centered design to balance safety with privacy. It outlines three integrated approaches: ethical co-design research with families using diary studies; the CO-oPS joint family oversight platform to review app permissions and foster transparent dialogue; and the MOSafely dashboard for collaborative evaluation of AI-driven risk detection. Early findings suggest diary studies enable participant control and that real-time, just-in-time parental mediation can mitigate online risks; CO-oPS can enhance mutual understanding though concerns about transparency and power dynamics persist; MOSafely seeks stakeholder input to validate and refine risk-detection algorithms. The work aims to establish best practices for family-centered online safety and privacy design, offering actionable design recommendations (nudges, incentives, expert resources) and laying groundwork for scalable, collaborative interventions with broad applicability to mobile privacy and digital security within families.
Abstract
Traditional online safety technologies often overly restrict teens and invade their privacy, while parents often lack knowledge regarding their digital privacy. As such, prior researchers have called for more collaborative approaches on adolescent online safety and networked privacy. In this paper, we propose family-centered approaches to foster parent-teen collaboration in ensuring their mobile privacy and online safety while respecting individual privacy, to enhance open discussion and teens' self-regulation. However, challenges such as power imbalances and conflicts with family values arise when implementing such approaches, making parent-teen collaboration difficult. Therefore, attending the family-centered design workshop will provide an invaluable opportunity for us to discuss these challenges and identify best research practices for the future of collaborative online safety and privacy within families.