In this episode of Digital Dominoes, host Angeline Corvaglia speaks with Christer Veland, a parent from Oslo, Norway, who has become a privacy advocate for children in schools. With a background in IT and tech, Christer sheds light on privacy concerns related to the use of iPads in classrooms, sharing his personal journey from discovering inappropriate content on his child’s device to advocating for better digital safeguards. The discussion covers the challenges of protecting children’s data, the importance of competent privacy measures, and practical advice for non-tech-savvy parents on how to safeguard their children’s digital lives.
00:00 Introduction
to Digital Privacy for Children
00:33 Meet Christer Veland: A Tech-Savvy Parent
02:09 The iPad Incident: A Turning Point
04:03 Fighting for Privacy: From Local to National
06:46 Technical Solutions and Challenges
15:14 The Broader Impact on Education
22:41 Practical Advice for Parents
25:03 Conclusion and Call to Action
Christer mentions these tools/websites in the episode:
- Adguard: https://adguard.com/en/welcome.html
- https://amiunique.org/ Learn how identifiable you are on the Internet
We can also recommend these articles that explain the issue of content and data sharing.
- Aimed at teens: What You Should Know About School Technology and Data Sharing – Data Girl and Friends
- Aimed at parents: Tech at School: Protecting Your Child’s Privacy – ANGELINE CORVAGLIA
In addition, we also recommend these resources:
- Me2B Alliance Product Testing Report on School Mobile Apps Student Data Sharing Behavior: https://internetsafetylabs.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/school-apps-data-sharing-behavior-spotlight-report-final.pdf
- Edtech law center’s resources on issues with edtech: https://edtech.law/issues-with-edtech/
Transcript
The same time I'm giving devices to my own kids. And then when my oldest daughter were in third grade here in Norway, there was a big change. Well, we basically got a letter from school saying that we've been using iPads in the classroom for two weeks. And that was the first message. They already been using it for two weeks.
ow do you use it? What's the [:ically replaced school books [:'s enough. I'll, uh, this is [:rnet and having good privacy [:ey where I'm, this is back in:law, like all municipalities [:How you do it, that's up to you. That's where it ended up. I was just talking to Daniel in Spain about how Google was negotiating directly with his school. And it seems, once again, quite a power imbalance, these schools. I mean, they don't have that expertise. The schools to, to understand even how to protect the internet.
country with more money than [:h further than what we did in:y and is has a very good way [:That was [:uter, subscribed to an extra [:men. Took a first grade iPad.[:Basically connected to my router and then I only have that iPad connected to the router. So basically everything I see of traffic in that router is the iPad and nothing else, basically. And then I connect the router to a system I use personally, AdGuard, which has a great DNS service. What that means is that all the traffic that goes through AdGuard and my router is then analyzed by AdGuard.
t on the web, it's basically [:et from plugging in my phone [:end like an hour on the iPad [:go in to AdGuard and look at [:ertising sent to the iPad or [:Well, this is the iPad who is sending traffic to the advertisement networks that can happen in two ways. One way is that you actively go into let's let's say you take a newspaper that has advertisements, right? Then you, we all see visible advertisements on that newspaper. It can be, when you're scrolling down, it can be on the sides, it can be everywhere, right?
advertisement networks. That [:the kids are not logged in. [:it sends to the websites you [:So basically you're almost logged in without being logged in, right? So it's, it's not very hard to collect this data and aggregate it on your machine. And then over time, we understand that this is the same person, basically moving between three IP addresses. It could be a home, it could be a school, maybe some, some other place.
n, basically. So this is the [:. This is lack of knowledge. [:rom, from a lot of different [:d be possible to access from [:Now there's clear recommendation from the government to do this from first to seventh grade. And that will effectively just open the sites you're supposed to access. And all the advertisement networks won't be able to to be accessed from the apps. So that that is very effective. This has been a long and tedious work.
tical parties and things. So [:nd making it stop. You would [:But there was another thing you told me that I want to talk about because I quoted it actually in the episode that's airing tomorrow for the first time. When your school switched to iPads, you were mentioning your experience in digital transformation. That's the way, that's not a best practice.
oment to the next. I've been [:we need people in healthcare [:And we went into the big promise that everything is going to be solved by AI. Personal learning on the iPad and on the screen, basically. So we went like super fast into throwing out all the practical stuff, throwing out basic mathematics and things and sort of hoping that the mathematics apps will help the kid.
ve to go further than my own [:hese basic stuff. How do you [:n private and public sector. [:ically be proud of ourselves [:And they did it just by acquiring devices. And then they were done. And that's terrible, right? That's no way to digitalize. You have to do inside work. You have to understand the needs. You have to understand if it benefits more than what they have from before. You need to understand the friction points and where is value and you have to use it right.
ot of resources, like books, [:t in the digital society, we [:ybe we haven't thought about [:ell, there could be, because [:u can just forget to be able [:s home school collaboration. [:or both the teachers and the [:So this needs to be corrected. I mean, we need to rebalance that so that it can, you know, work really well again because that's one of the biggest success criterias for school. I would say. Well, I would say too, I hope you continue to move slowly, unfortunately, in Norway, hopefully it will speed up your, hopefully it will speed up your success.
told me about Norway wanting [:st digitalized country in, by:Yeah. Yeah. We need to learn from you the rest of the world. Is it either laugh or cry, right? It's both. It's really both.
or me personally, it's been, [:I mean, if you want to look up that one, it's AdGuard DNS. I think you could start with a free plan. And I don't think I pay much. I'll put it into this show notes, actually. Also the other one you mentioned as well. Yeah, you also have NextDNS and you have, you have, uh, ControlD. You have a lot of different things out there to DNS services that can help you.
t's very easy to do the next [:domains that we use, right? [:You have these upsides as well. But the main thing is that you learn about how much data and where your data is going on an everyday basis, which is like super great knowledge. And this will probably give you the same idea as I could probably test my kids iPads at school or the PC and you can start to sort of be that person locally as well.
his is helping bringing real [:ontribute in any way, please [:Digital [: