Once again, a huge thank you to the teens at Encounters with Canada, who, this morning, picked our 2010 youth video contest winners!

The top video artist in the Surveillance category was: Natalie Westrup, of Osgoode Township High School, Metcalfe, Ont., with a video titled “Permanent Storage”. She wins an iPad.

The top video artists in the Targeted Advertising category were: Lesia Karalash, Tyler Lafferty and Chelsea Deptuch, of Evan Hardy Collegiate, Saskatoon, Sask., with a video titled “Targeted”. They each win an iPad.

The three top video artists in the Online Scams category were:

1st place: Kelsey Moretto, of Osgoode Township High School, Metcalfe Ont, with a video titled “Online Scams”. She wins an iPad.

2nd place: Elad Cohen, of The Anne and Max Tanenbaum Community Hebrew Academy, Toronto, Ont, with a video titled “Be Careful With Your Credit Card”. He wins a $200 gift card.

3rd place: Bryn Sielski and Jesse Tangen, of F.R. Haythorne Jr. High School, Sherwood Park, Alta., with a video titled “Something Smells Phishy in Your E-mail.” They each win a $100 gift card.

 The three top video artists in the Online Reputation category were:

 1st place: Terran Tasci, Erica Thumm and Myesha Geoffrion, of Chatelech Secondary School, Sechelt, BC, with a video titled “How Well Do You Know Me?” They each win an iPad.

2nd place: Ben Chinapen, of SDSS Comtech Club, Port Elgin, Ont, with a video titled “The Interview”.

3rd place: Kristal Barakat and Maryrose Chahine, of Hillcrest High School, Ottawa, Ont., with a video titled “Jpgs Don’t Die”.

Four teachers were also recognized for their enthusiastic participation in the contest. They were:

 • Crystal Getschel, F.R. Haythorne Junior High, Sherwood Park, Alta.

 • Majed Mattar, Osgoode Township High School, Metcalfe, Ont..

• Prof. Kaduri, The Anne and Max Tanenbaum Community Hebrew Academy, Toronto, Ont.

 • Stephen Willcock, Canterbury High School, Ottawa, Ont., with five entries.

Each teacher will receive a $250 gift certificate at Indigo Books and Music.

A big thanks to all the students and teachers who participated this year. We will be launching the 2011 contest, with some great new categories, in the summer. Stay tuned!

I’m sure many of you have downloaded a Facebook app or two in the past and for those of you who are frequent downloaders you are familiar with this request for permission prompt:

This prompt enables applications to request access to your basic information by having you check a simple box. By checking this box you provide applications with access to your name, profile picture, list of friends, and any other information that is available to your friends. Only a few small checkboxes lie in the way of us getting the latest application of “Pirates Vs. Ninjas” or “Is he your soulmate?”. Let’s be honest, many of us just check the box so we can get to the fun stuff without considering the long term consequences, including where that information may end up. Although sharing this kind of information may seem fairly harmless to you, Facebook continues to push the boundaries of what we feel is acceptable to share.

Just recently, Facebook began to allow developers to request access to home addresses and phone numbers of users. Just as easily as we shared our basic information, a simple checkbox would allow us to share much more personal contact information.

However, consider this – virtually anyone with an Internet connection and some programming skills can create a Facebook App. By giving these developers access to our personal information we risk having it sold to spammers and marketers.  The release of this information could even put us at risk of identity theft.

After widespread criticism, Facebook has disabled this feature and is making changes that would allow users to only share information when they want to. Facebook has not yet said what the changes will be so keep your eyes peeled next time you download an app and consider where your information may end up.

The Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario just released a Resource Guide that includes teaching lessons on privacy protection and freedom of information for grade 10 teachers in Ontario.

The Guide contains activities that aim to generate discussion on topics like democracy and the elements of open government and individual rights; the risks involved in giving out personal information; and the potential privacy implications of posting information online, especially on social networking sites.

These issues aren’t just for civics geeks to chew on – they have an effect on all of us, every day.

They could be. A simple photo of your new haircut could also be telling tech-savvy people exactly where you live. If you’re using a GPS-enabled smartphone or a digital camera, you could be posting photos and videos with geotags embedded in the images. Geotags are data that provide the longitude and latitude of where that photo or video was taken.

So, if the photo is taken at your house, geotags will provide information about where you live. If the photo is taken anywhere else, geotags will tell people where you were when the photo was taken. If the geotag tells people where your house is and you post a comment like “Sam is going out tonight!” people now know where you live and that you won’t be home that night – quite valuable information for any potential thieves who might be looking at your online information.

The problem with geotagged photos and videos is the location information isn’t visible to casual viewers (you have to take some steps to look for it), so you might not even realize it’s there. If you are unknowingly posting photos and videos with geotags, this could affect your privacy (if everyone now knows where you live), as well as your safety.

If you want to disable the geotagging function on your smartphone, you often have to go through several layers of menus to find the “location” setting and then select “off” or “don’t allow”. The web site ICanStalkU.com has step-by-step instructions for disabling the photo geotagging function on iPhone, Blackberry, Android and Palm devices.

It seems nowadays everyone and their cat has a Facebook, Twitter, or Myspace account. However, there are a rare few that have decided to take themselves out of these virtual spaces and live a life free of wall posts, fake friends, or faceless followers. To the teens who update their status fifteen times a day, it may seem shocking, but many celebrities are even hanging up the towel on social networking sites. So how can I terminate all of my profiles and accounts? Well, there are a few ways to go about this. If you want to get rid of your Facebook account for example, the site makes it fairly easy to do so with a few simple steps. However, if you want to make a complete exit from the digital world, you might need some outside help to get rid of your virtual persona.

Organizations such as the Suicide Machine go into the accounts you don’t want and then remove you from the network. The web 2.0 Suicide Machine works on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Myspace accounts. The website warns you that once you choose to commit virtual suicide your password is changed and your account can’t be resurrected. By terminating these accounts you are able to eliminate a lot of privacy and security issues that surround social networking sites. But such drastic measures aren’t the only way to address privacy and security concerns – many of these issues can also be solved by simply being aware of the risks and exercising caution when you’re online.

You’ve got one tab open to your Facebook page, one to your favorite website, and you’re sending someone a message on Myspace while simultaneously Googling Albert Einstein for your physics project and IMing your best friend.

You’re pretty comfortable around the internet. In fact, a new study by the Neilson Norman Group confirms that children under 10 can be just as capable as adults when it comes to navigating the net. (Maybe you can teach your parents a thing or two!)

Navigating around advertising, however, is a different story. The study showed that children under the age of 6 were unaware of the concept of advertising. Kids in older age brackets could grasp the concept, but couldn’t always tell the difference between an advertisement and actual site content. Confusing, right?

The study suggests that in order to combat the confusion, ads should have large and clear labels indicating that they are, in fact, advertisements. It also recommends that the advertising be limited to the right hand side of the page. When an ad is clicked, there should be a clear notification that the user is leaving the original website, with options to continue or go back.

Finally, the study recommends matching advertisements as closely as possible with site content. This helps the website remain age-friendly, and won’t deter kids with age-inappropriate ads (because there’s nothing quite like seeing an ad for denture cream when you still haven’t lost all your baby teeth…)

So the next time you see a cool flashy graphic on your favorite website, see if you can figure out if it’s an ad or not!

Check out this cool new video from the New Zealand Office of the Privacy Commissioner. You can use it for inspiration for our video contest, or simply to see how easy it is to lose control of your personal information!

YouTube video – “Your Information – Is it really yours?”

We’re launching our 2010 My Privacy & Me Video Contest – and the first-place winners will win an iPad!

Again, we’re asking you to create your own public service announcement about privacy. But this year, we’d like the videos to fall into one of four categories: Surveillance (something about all those video cameras, maybe?); Reputation Management (it’s hard to do when it’s so easy to post those party pictures); Targeted Advertising (there’s a reason why it’s so hard to keep that money in your wallet!); or Online Scams (people fall for them more often than you think!).

Your video should be between 60 and 120 seconds long, and speak to other young people about the message in the category you’ve chosen. You can do the video however you like – live action, animation, French or English. We will subtitle all the finalist videos so they work in either official language. The winning videos will be featured on youthprivacy.ca and on our YouTube channel – meaning they will be seen by tonnes of kids, teachers and parents!

This year, teams can consist of one to three people. First-place winners in each category will win an iPad. Second-place winners will win a $200 gift card; and third-place winners will win a $100 gift card. We’ve recognized top-participating schools and teachers in the past, and we have something in store for you guys again in 2010! The deadline is December 10, 2010. You can find all contest details here.

If you need inspiration, watch the 2009 winning videos. Then, exercise your video-making moxie – we can’t wait to see what you’ve got!

Any unflattering photos of you online? Comments you made on a friend’s blog that you wish you hadn’t? When you can’t change what’s online about you, you might find yourself wishing you could just walk away from that stuff – disconnect your real-world self from your online self.

The CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, thinks you can. He even predicts that in the future, this practice would be commonplace:

“He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites.

“I mean we really have to think about these things as a society,” he adds. “I’m not even talking about the really terrible stuff, terrorism and access to evil things,” he says.”

Already, some young people about to apply to university and look for jobs are making it a little harder for people to find them on social networking sites – by substituting middle names for last names, using nicknames, or making up entirely fictional names. However, changing your name legally isn’t nearly as simple as changing your name on Facebook. There is a long list of legal and long-term implications associated with changing your name, not to mention the historical implications of the change – how will your great-great-great-grand-daughter fill in the family tree if you erase all traces of yourself before the age of 18?

What do you think – should we be allowed a name change to escape an embarrassing past? Would you change your name if you could? Have you?

We’re frequently invited to schools to talk about online privacy. And when we’re there, we often hear about the challenges related to kids’ use of technology that educators face daily. For many teachers, the question of their own involvement is murky at best – much of this online activity takes place outside of the schoolyard, often after the end of the school day. But the repercussions of those activities can reach into, and disrupt, the classroom.

Technological solutions, like attempts to limit access to certain websites, seem backwards and futile. The most successful approaches so far seem to be the ones that aim to empower and engage young people, by helping them evolve beyond simply users of technology to become true digital citizens.

A recent study from the U.S. suggests that teachers who are comfortable with technology report greater student learning, specifically when it comes to those skills related to digital citizenship:

“Frequent technology users place considerably more emphasis on developing students’ 21st century skills–specifically, skills in accountability, collaboration, communication, creativity, critical thinking, ethics, global awareness, innovation, leadership, problem solving, productivity and self-direction. Frequent users also have more positive perceptions about technology’s effects on student learning of these skills–and on student behaviors associated with these skills.”

This skill set is increasingly becoming essential for success in our world. Having a true digital citizenry is still a long way away, but the march toward this goal has already started, at home, and in classrooms and libraries and community centres around the world. We need to continue to play and experiment and grow comfortable with these new tools, and we need to encourage those of us around us – teachers included – to do so as well.