Trace one ordinary day. Your alarm app logged when you woke. Your phone reported its location to a dozen services before you left the house. A search engine kept what you typed; a streaming service noted what you skipped; a fitness tracker counted your steps and your sleep. None of this felt like handing anything over — and yet somewhere, each of those records now sits in a database, attached to you, being stored, analysed, and in many cases sold. You never signed anything. Or rather — you did, in a document nobody on Earth reads.
Questions worth arguing about:
- List everything that recorded something about you before 9 a.m. today. Which of those recordings did you knowingly agree to — and what does “knowingly” even mean here?
- “I have nothing to hide.” What does that argument assume about who will hold the data, forever, and what they will do with it? Does it survive a change of owner, or a change of law?
- If an app is free, someone is still paying for the servers. Who is the customer, and what is the product? Does knowing this change which apps you would install?
- Clicking “I agree” on terms nobody reads — is that consent? What would real consent look like, and would anyone offer it?
- You can delete an account. Can you delete the data — the copies, the backups, the profiles already sold onward? What control do you actually have, as opposed to the control the settings page implies?
- Schools, employers, and governments collect data too, often for good reasons. Where is the line between looking after people and watching them — and who should get to draw it?
This argument has a practical edge. Every habit in Staying Secure Online — and every choice about what lives where in Files and the Cloud — starts with knowing what you are actually sharing. You cannot make safe and deliberate data choices about a trail you have never once turned around to look at. Today we look.
Curriculum connection
A2.1
investigate current social, cultural, economic, environmental, and ethical issues related to digital technology that have personal, local, and global impacts, taking various perspectives into account
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B3.1
apply safe and effective data practices when using digital technology in various contexts
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