We all know how savvy kids are with the Internet and online tools. Many of them are way ahead of adults in adapting to new technologies, making it difficult to keep up with them – let alone educate them on online privacy.

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada is here to help. Today, we launched a new video, tip sheet and presentation package  for youth in grades 7 and 8 (Secondary I and II in Quebec) that will help parents and teachers talk to youth about the importance of protecting their privacy online.

The new video speaks to teens and ‘tweens alike, and covers the key privacy concepts kids need to consider when sharing information online. The video may be viewed online or downloaded to support discussion.

The new tip sheet offers 12 practical tips for parents interested in discussing online privacy with their kids. The tips include simple ideas and advice that parents may use to limit risks to their children’s personal information, while allowing them to continue enjoying their time online.

The Grades 7 and 8 presentation package is the latest release in the Office’s Protecting Your Online Rep presentation series. The package includes slides, speaking notes and discussion topics for use by educators and community leaders to speak with young people about online privacy. The new presentation offers much of the practical privacy advice found in the presentation package for grades 9 to 12, which our Office launched last fall, only the graphics and speaking notes have been tailored to the social realities and online activities of younger students.

These tools are being launched this week as part of our Office’s week-long campaign leading up to Data Privacy Day. For more information on the Office’s Data Privacy Day activities and resources, go to http://www.priv.gc.ca/resource/dpd/2012/index_e.cfm.

To participate, we’re asking them to create their own video public service announcements about privacy issues related to any one of these four categories:

• mobile devices;
• social networking;
• online gaming; or
• cybersecurity.

All contest details can be found here.

Entries must be submitted by teams of one or two people. Schools may submit up to 10 different videos. (If a school has more than 10 videos to submit, we suggest a contest be held within the school to select the 10 best submissions for this contest).

First-place winners in each category will receive a $350 gift card, second-place winners will receive a $200 gift card, and third-place winners will win a $100 gift card. The deadline is Wednesday, Feb. 1, 2012 at noon ET.

For inspiration, we encourage teams to watch the 2010 winning videos. Then, power up their video cameras, and show us what they have to say!

The appointees bring to the committee further expertise in a range of areas, including the privacy implications related to online technologies and electronic commerce. The new members are:

• Mark McArdle, a seasoned technology executive with more than 18 years of global product development experience, including over 10 years at McAfee Inc. in California; 
• Loreena McKennitt, a self-managed Canadian singer/composer and successful business woman, who, through her independent record label, has won critical acclaim worldwide. In 2006, she was involved in a landmark human rights privacy case in Britain, where the courts ruled in her favour; and
• Jean-François Renaud, associate founder of Adviso Consulting Inc., a company specializing in Internet strategy and web marketing

The 18-member External Advisory Committee is comprised of seasoned privacy experts and public sector scholars and practitioners, who provide expert advice on strategic directions for the Office.

For a complete list of members and to see our news release click here.

In the context of their fields of privacy expertise, we will discuss how we represent ourselves both online and off and the implications of changing perceptions of public and private spaces. The discussion will extend to the challenges of maintaining a professional and personal presence online.

The Insights on Privacy Speakers’ Series is a series of armchair discussions hosted by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner to shed light on new and provocative voices doing interesting work in the field of privacy.

Alessandro Acquisti is an Associate Professor of Information Technology and Public Policy at the Heinz College, Carnegie Mellon University. He is the co-director of the CMU Center for Behavioral Decision Research (CBDR), a member of Carnegie Mellon Cylab, and a fellow of the Ponemon Institute. His work investigates the economic and social impact of information technology, and in particular the economics and behavioural economics of privacy and information security, as well as privacy in online social networks.  He is co-editor the book Digital Privacy: Theory, Technologies, and Practices (2007), an analysis of state-of-the-art technologies, best practices, and research results, as well as legal, regulatory, and ethical issues.

Christena Nippert-Eng is Associate Professor of Sociology in the College of Science and Letters at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Her most recent book, Islands of Privacy: Selective Concealment and Disclosure in Everyday Life (2010) is an exploration of the ways we think about privacy on a daily basis – how we try to achieve it for ourselves and enable it for others. In addition to her work as the National Chair of the Communication and Information Technologies Section of the American Sociological Association (2010-2011), Dr. Nippert-Eng conducts industrial research on people’s behaviour and relationships with objects and spaces, including information and communication technologies. She is currently at work on a second book on privacy and socialization.

To participate:

We are inviting full participation in this discussion. For those of you who attend the session in person, we will be inviting questions from the audience as well as inviting you to tweet the content using the #privtalks hashtag.

If you are unable to attend the session in person, and would like the speakers to address a particular aspect of this topic, please send your question to knowledge.savoir@priv.gc.ca by February 24th and we will try to incorporate it in the issues we cover.

We will also be offering the audience members the opportunity to complete a voluntary survey to provide us with their views on some of the key questions in the discussion.

The video of this event will be made available after the event, as we did for the December 10, 2010 event with Jesse Hirsh and Chris Soghoian.

Space is limited and is available on a first-come, first-served basis. Please RSVP before February 25, 2011. Simultaneous interpretation for both official languages will be available.

When: 2:00-4:00 p.m. Monday, February 28, 2011
Where: Minto Suites Hotel, 185 Lyon Street North, 2^nd Floor, Salon Vanier/Stanley

RSVP: knowledge.savoir@priv.gc.ca

The three top video artists in the live action category were:

1^st place: Jeffery Burge, Vanessa Caicedo, Alexandra Georgaras, Gareth Imrie and Fiona Sauder of Canterbury High School in Ottawa, Ontario, with a video titled “Think Before You Click”. They win a $100 gift card and an iPod Touch.

2^nd place: David Borish and Mory Kaba of Glebe Collegiate Institute in Ottawa, Ontario, with a video titled “Friend or Foe”. They win a $250 gift card.

3^rd place: Jennifer Paul from Brampton, Ontario, with a video titled “Too Good to be True”. She wins a $150 gift card.

The three top video artists in the animation category were:

1^st place: Tyler Ford and Matthew Kerr of Osgoode Township High School in Metcalfe, Ontario, with a video titled “Privacy: Think Before You Click”. They win a $100 gift card and an iPod Touch.

2^nd place: Rebecca Kartzmart and Emily Patterson of Osgoode Township High School in Metcalfe, Ontario, with a video titled “Carol the Carrot”. They win a $250 gift card.

3^rd place: Scott Piper of Osgoode Township High School in Metcalfe, Ontario, with a video titled “Privacy Matters”. He wins a $150 gift card.

The three top video artists in the French video category were:

1^st place: Benjamin Dion-Weiss of l’École secondaire publique De La Salle in Ottawa, Ontario, with a video titled “Le réseautage social d’après le Comte Hackula”. He wins a $100 gift card and an iPod Touch.

2^nd place: Stéphanie Lemieux and Emily Vendette of l’École secondaire catholique Embrun in Embrun, Ontario, with a video titled “Le Journal de Lisa”. They win a $250 gift card.

3^rd place: Cosmo Darwin of l’École secondaire publique De La Salle in Ottawa, Ontario, with a video titled “Trouvée & Perdu”. He wins a $150 gift card.

The three top video artists in the Junior category were:

1^st place: Mackenzie Giffen, Chris Johnstone, Chris Nattrass, Curtis Sookhoo and Gabriel Zingle of F.R. Haythorne Junior High in Sherwood Park, Alberta, with a video titled “The Spanish Lottery”. They win a $100 gift card and an iPod Touch.

2^nd place: Trevor Aiello, Connor Bergersen, Chad Bullock and Lochlan Thomson of F.R. Haythorne Junior High in Sherwood Park, Alberta, with a video titled “A lesson In Privacy”. They win a $250 gift card.

3^rd place: Matthew Craner, Scott Deshane, Madison Gilchrist, Joe Matishak and Graeme Wyatt of F.R. Haythorne Junior High in Sherwood Park, Alberta, with a video titled “The Phone Number Test”. They win a $150 gift card.

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

• Crystal Getschel, of F.R. Haythorne Junior High in Sherwood Park, Alberta, with 26 entries.
• Majed Mattar, of Osgoode Township High School in Metcalfe, Ontario, with 21 entries.
• Professor Kaduri, of Tanenbaum Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto, Ontario, with 15 entries.
• Grant Holmes, of École secondaire publique De La Salle, Ottawa, Ontario, with 11 entries.
• Carol Shaw, of Woodstock Collegiate Institute, Woodstock, Ontario, with 8 entries.
• Kevin Shae, of Sir Robert Borden High School, Ottawa, Ontario with 6 entries.
• Stephen Willcock, of Canterbury High School, Ottawa, Ontario, with 5 entries.

Each teacher will receive a $250 gift certificate at Indigo Books and Music to use for personal use or for the school they represent.

The videos will be posted as soon as possible to our youth site. They will also be available on our YouTube channel.

We were thrilled with the number and quality of submissions we received for our second competition. We’ll be launching the 2010 contest in May!

And while such toys and gadgets can be fun, we want people to enjoy them without putting their privacy and personal information at risk.

Here are our tips for protecting your privacy as you and your loved ones enjoy your new gadgets and toys. For parents especially:

Understand new toys and their capabilities – It is important to understand the capabilities of new toys and how your children will use them. Speak with your kids about how they will use the toy and, where appropriate, agree on guidelines and limits.

Pay attention to privacy settings and parental controls – Privacy settings on social networking sites control what people see about you. Only allow your friends to see your page, your posts, your photos and your applications. Parents, if you depend on parental control software that is installed on your desktop, remember that. Those controls won’t be in place on new mobile devices.

Remember, with Wi-Fi, children can access the Internet from anywhere in the house – And if their new toy/gadget has Internet capabilities they can also use it to access the Internet from locations and networks outside your supervision and control.

Here are our tips for protecting your privacy as you and your loved ones enjoy your new gadgets and toys. For everyone:

Think before you click – The Internet is a public arena, and photos and comments you post are permanent. Even if you delete them from a web page, they could continue to exist in archived pages, in your computer’s cache or on the computers of other Internet users who may have copied them. If you don’t want certain people to see something, now or in the future, don’t post it!

Pick and protect the perfect password – Your information is only as safe as your passwords. Use different passwords for different systems; make sure they are strong (eight characters or more and a variety of letters or numbers); never share them with anybody; and change them regularly.

Know your friends – Online, you can’t be 100 per cent sure who you are talking to. Don’t accept friend requests from people you don’t know in real life.

Protect your identity – Identity theft is a growing problem and the Internet is the least private of spaces. Don’t post or e-mail personal details such as your social insurance number, phone number, home address or birth date.

Be careful on online gaming sites – Online gaming sites are hotbeds of people accessing personal information. Be aware that ill-intentioned people can use information from your profile to establish accounts in your name, or use your stolen identity to access your existing accounts.

Be wary of e-mail or instant messages from unknown people – Don’t open online messages that seem odd or are from someone you don’t know. They could contain a virus or let a hacker gain access to your computer.

Have a happy holiday and enjoy all your new toys!