Setting up an account
A new app asks for your real name, your birthday, your school and a profile photo. It says this helps you find friends.
What do you fill in?
Step 1: What Would You Do?
There is often more than one good answer. Pick one and see what happens.
A photo of your room
You want to post a photo of a new poster in your bedroom.
What do you check first?
Step 2: What That Was
The name for what you just worked out.
The test is not "is it secret". It is: could somebody use this to find me, or to pretend to be me?
Things that help find you
Your address, your school, the park you go to every Tuesday, your street in the background of a photo.
Things that help be you
Your full name with your birthday, your passwords, your account names.
Other people’s too
A photo of your friend is partly theirs. Ask before you post somebody else.
Step 3: Try It
These ones do have right answers.
Would You Post It?
Sort each one.
Which of these are safe to put on a public profile?
Tap something to move it.
- Empty
- Empty
Step 4: Quick Check
Two questions, then you are done.
Question 1 of 1
Your friend asks you to post a photo of both of you. What do you do?
Step 5: Your Life Mission
Something to do away from the screen. Nobody is checking.
Check one background
- Find a photo you have taken.
- List everything visible that is not the subject.
- Decide whether you would post it now.
Why: One careful look at one real photo teaches this better than any rule.
Step 6: What You Learned
- Private means: could it help somebody find me or be me?
- Photos carry more than you meant to put in them.
- Ask before you post somebody else.
For the grown-up
A consequence-based test survives new platforms and new forms; a list of forbidden facts does not. That is why the lesson defines private by what it enables rather than by category.
The background-of-photos point is worth doing practically, once, with a real photo. Children find it genuinely surprising how much is in shot.
Consent for photos of other people is easiest to establish now, before it becomes a much harder conversation at thirteen.