Designing and Evaluating an Interactive Learning Technology to Foster Privacy Literacy

The “Privat-o-Mat” is a media ethics learning technology to promote reflection on privacy literacy. In this article, we discuss its ethical conception, design, and development and present a qualitative evaluation of the tool with a sample of secondary school students. Children, adolescents, and young adults (CAYA) today grow up in digitalized environments that threaten their privacy in various ways. Therefore, the development of an ethically founded privacy literacy, defined as the formation of a personal value system, constitutes a central developmental task. The Privat-o-Mat supports this CAYA age group to reflect on their behavior when facing privacy risks on the Internet. Based on the principles of human-centered design and ethics by design, it confronts users with 15 everyday scenarios to identify their personal type of data protection. We conducted an empirical evaluation of the Privat-o-Mat consisting of a survey followed by a qualitative content analysis according to P. Mayring and found that this learning technology enabled a sample of three different groups of students from the German state of Baden-Württemberg to reflect on their own attitudes toward privacy on the Internet. This effect was especially strong among respondents who considered their previous level of reflection on privacy to be low. Long-term behavioral change, however, would require the supplementation of the Privat-o-Mat with other learning technologies.