How young children cope with online personal data collection by commercial parties? (G019517N)

Children are confronted with commercial messages at increasingly younger ages. Accordingly, advertisers are searching for new strategies to break through the clutter and attract children’ attention. One way of doing so is by personalizing the advertisements. This can be done by integrating the name of the child or by responding to the child’ interests. To be able to personalize the advertisements, they need to collect the personal data from the children. They can collect this information by explicitly asking children to give them their personal data or by implicitly tracking their search and surf behaviors online. Research on how children respond to this personal data collection methods and how they are able to grasp the commercial process behind personalized advertising is however lacking. The current project therefore examines children’ ability to recognize and understand (and thus their level of advertising literacy) this advertising tactic. In addition, the project will investigate how children cope (and thus which privacy management strategy they will apply) with personal data collection, based on the cost-benefit trade off they make when confronted with this practice. To conclude, the moderating impact of parental mediation and training sessions will be investigated. The current project will use a mixed method research design consisting of in-depth interviews and experimental studies with children and parents to answer the research objectives.