Protecting Personal Information

Image from Pixabay.

With Teacher Lucila in the class of 6º A we have worked a Good Practice proposed by our partners of Turkey.

This practice is called “Protecting Personal information” and pursues the following objectives:

• To keep personal information private on the net.
• To understand the risk of sharing personal information.
• To understand the consequences of sharing personal information.
• To learn out the ways of keeping private information.

Warm up activities were organized in small groups and pupils talked about the following issues:

Have you got a Social Media account? Which Social Medias do you use?

About 95% of pupils in the class have Social Media accounts. The most used are Instagram, WhatsApp, Tik Tok (It’s a recent application for mobile phones that you can use for making playbacks of your favourite singers or the music that your prefer) Hangouts… 

Do you share your real birthday date? Do you think that can cause a problem?

All the class told that they don’t share his/her real birthday date. We can check that their navigation in this issue is secure. According to them given this information can cause problems such as Identity theft, grooming, phishing…

After these reflections pupils worked in groups of five pupils. In each group a pupil assumed the leader role reading and writing the peers’ answers. This is the story we read:

Jack is a young man who has a Facebook account. When Jack has signed up, he has typed his real birthday which is 9th of September. And as soon as he joins Facebook, he accepts every friend request since it is considered a “cool thing” to have 500 or more friends.

Facebook sends alert to his friends when his birthday is coming closer. He receives many birthday wishes on his birthday on Facebook which enjoys him a lot.

One day, he loses his bank card. He looks for it everywhere and he can’t find it. He reaches out his bank to inform about his loss. When he checks out his bank account, he realizes his all money is gone. 

We make some reflections about this story. For this task teachers give pupils the following questions:

What happened to his money?

Pupils said that somebody had stolen Jack’s money and his money has disappeared.

Bank cards need a password. What could it be?

This question was very important because pupils understood the importance of a strong password. This should contain: capital letters, symbols, numbers…

Examples of weak password can be:

• 160379: This password corresponds to a birthday date.
• 89147: This password only contains numbers.
• Juan: It only contains lower and upper case letters.

A good example of strong password: JuAN_85.

Where is this information shared?

They indicated Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

What are Jack’s mistakes which lead him losing his money?

All the class recognized that the three main Jack’s mistakes were:

• Accepting friends’ invitations.
• Creating an account in an early age.
• Sharing his birthdate and putting it as his main password.

What do you suggest Jack to do?

• Don’t publish personal data in social networks.
• His account should be in private mode.
• Don’t publish all the moments of his life.

In conclusion Lucila’s pupils learnt that:

• We shouldn’t publish everything and we have to take care when we are a child.
• Some networks are connected itself.
• We shouldn’t create easy passwords.
• A long password doesn’t mean that it is secure.
• We should be in Social Networks when we are 14 years. If we need to be before we need parents’ permission.

Our final product was to design a slogan which may help other peers no to experience the same situation that Jack has had. This slogan was an interactive poster done with the web tool “The poster my wall”.

We share our presentation of the good practice in order to other schools and teacher can do it. Let us know what are your results and conclusions.