Celebrating Safer Internet Day 11 February 2025
February 11 is the Safter Internet Day of 2025.
As part of Data Privacy Day on January 28, Senior Researcher Dr Jun Zhao (Jun Z.) spoke to ITV about her research, describing how users’ online activity and data can be aggregated and used by scammers to create tailored privacy attacks. Watch from around 18 minutes here: https://lnkd.in/euz5hRdZ.
In this, Jun raises her concerns of some less discussed online risks for children.
One of the lesser-discussed concerns in public discourse is how much of the screen time addiction or personalised exposure to online content can be attributed to how children’s data is collected on various platforms, processed, and exploited by algorithms designed to maximise screen engagement and expose them to specific content.
This is an area we work on extensively in Oxford Computer Science: raising public awareness of the impact of data-driven manipulations on children, influencing policy-making, and designing new algorithms that prioritise children’s best interests and protect their vulnerabilities.
Among the many technological challenges we face today, if there’s one thing I could change, it would be stopping platforms from harvesting children’s online behaviours and using “machine-generated insights” to irresponsibly manipulate their online experiences.’
Dr Jun Zhao’s research focuses on the impact of algorithm-driven decision making on everyday lives, with an emphasis on families and young children. She uses a human-centred approach focusing on real users’ needs in order to design technologies with real-world impacts. She is currently leading the UKRI-funded CHAILD (Children’s Agency In the age of AI) and EWADA (Ethical Web and Data Infrastructure in the Age of AI) projects. You can find out more about Dr Zhao’s research via her website.
See how Oxford CCAI celebrated the Safer Internet Day in previous years:
OxfordCCAI
Organisation
Oxford Child-Centred AI (Oxford CCAI) Design Lab assembles a series of research activities related to designing better AI for and with children. It is part of Human-Centred Computing at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford.