The Spanish Agency for Data Protection, in its commitment to the protection of the personal data of minors, it has created a web page called You Decide on the Internet. The objective of this page is to offer resources and informational materials for children, parents, guardians and members of the academic community interested in deepening the fundamental right to data protection in a simple and educational way. The contents are a compilation of own informative materials and links to other pages where you can find more information and other resources of interest.
For the Data Protection Agency it is important that children and young people have and apply criteria in their decisions and also that they know the consequences of them. This way of behaving should be taken more into consideration especially in the use of the Internet and social networks. For the Agency Children should not be too confident, they should differentiate between friends and acquaintances and should not share private information. For the Agency the final decision is in the hands of children and young people so they must be responsible and apply criteria.
Among the things that have surprised me about this project, in which a comic appears illustrating the project with the characters that appear in the header of the article, is the existence of Four data protection agencies!: Spanish Agency for Data Protection, Basque Agency for Data Protection, Agency for Data Protection of the Community of Madrid and Catalan Data Protection Authority. And as it seems that four are not enough, what they have done is to adapt the material originally produced by the Office of the Commissioner for Data Protection of Ireland.
In my opinion the documentation that can be seen on the website is impossible to understand, to follow and to apply either by minors, or by parents. Maybe for teachers, who are left access to a guide, can find useful information because in addition to links of interest, real cases related to privacy are explained. The guide is designed for Primary and Secondary Education teachers and it is structured in four units collected in 120 pages:
- Unit 1: introduction to privacy
- Unit 2: privacy is a fundamental right
- Unit 3: legal rights and responsibilities and applicable rules on data protection
- Unit 4: on the incidence of new technologies in privacy
