Date
Conversations about children’s digital privacy are frequent, and with good reason: ad revenue to tech companies from child viewers topped 11 billion dollars in 2023. These conversations include policy makers, educators, researchers, and parents, but children themselves are rarely included. The purpose of this talk was to explore what we know about children’s own perspectives on their digital privacy: particularly in the age of artificial intelligence. It covered what they notice, care about, and understand as it relates to online privacy and data security, and what researchers can explore next to continue child-centered conversations about how best to keep children safe online.
Speaker
Dr. Lauren N. Girouard is a National Science Foundation postdoctoral research scholar at the University of Michigan and Harvard University, where she works with Drs. Susan Gelman, Ying Xu, and Jenny Radesky on projects examining children’s beliefs about AI chatbots and how those beliefs translate into digital literacy in home and classroom environments. She graduated with her PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of Louisville in May 2024. Her work broadly examines how 4- to 17-year-old children think about, trust, and learn from emerging technologies and AI.
Lauren also serves as a teaching assistant in advanced multivariate statistics for ICPSR’s summer program in Ann Arbor and is the current Outreach Coordinator for the Cognitive Science Society, a leadership team member of the Communicating Science Conference (ComSciCon), and a member of the Editorial Collective for the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. Beginning in January 2027, Lauren will be an assistant professor in Applied Cognition at the College of New Jersey.