Is My Child Safe Online? - On Requirements for Parental Control Tools in Apps used by Children

João Victor Assis; George Valença

doi:10.5753/jis.2024.4240

Authors

João Victor Assis Federal Rural University of Pernambuco https://orcid.org/0009-0002-5440-4820
George Valença Federal Rural University of Pernambuco https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9375-5354

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5753/jis.2024.4240

Keywords:

Parental Control, Children, Requirements, Apps, social media, Features

Abstract

Following the Covid-19 pandemic, children have increased their use of mobile electronic devices to access the internet. Among the main applications used by children between 9 and 17 years old are the social and communication media platforms Instagram and TikTok. Consequently, they are more exposed to risky situations (e.g. objectionable content, sexual predators, cyberbullying, etc.). To address this scenario, we conducted a systematic mapping study and a snowballing process evaluating 33 primary studies to identify recommendations and general guidelines for parental control tools, which should be part of any social media app used by children. Based on this study, we derived 16 functional (FR) and 13 non-functional requirements (NFR) for IT companies to develop features that help caregivers and children promote online protection via assertive decisions and proper safeguards. We used those functional requirements as lenses of analysis of the two main social media software platforms largely used by children: Instagram and TikTok. Our findings revealed that TikTok’s parental control features are more mature and present more options for supervising and restricting children’s online activities than Instagram’s. Therefore, this research expands knowledge about the features for parental control and raises the discussion around children’s protection and welfare as relevant digital citizens.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

Albuquerque, N., Valença, G., and Falcão, T. (2023). How social media platforms manipulate kidinfluencers? analysing the adoption of deceptive design patterns by big techs. In Anais do XXII Simpósio Brasileiro sobre Fatores Humanos em Sistemas Computacionais, Porto Alegre, RS, Brasil. SBC. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3638067.3638123.

Alrumaih, H., Mirza, A., and Alsalamah, H. (2020). Domain ontology for requirements classification in requirements engineering context. IEEE Access, 8:89899–89908. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2020.2993838.

Altarturi, H. H., Saadoon, M., and Anuar, N. B. (2020). Cyber parental control: A bibliometric study. Children and Youth Services Review, 116:105134. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2020.105134.

BRAZIL (1988). Constituição da república federativa do brasil. [link], Accessed: 03 August 2024.

BRAZIL (1990a). Lei nº 8.069. dispõe sobre o estatuto da criança e do adolescente e dá outras providências. [link], Accessed: 03 August 2024.

BRAZIL (1990b). Lei nº 8.078. dispõe sobre a proteção do consumidor e dá outras providências. [link], Accessed: 03 August 2024.

BRAZIL (2014). Lei nº 12.965. estabelece princípios, garantias, direitos e deveres para o uso da internet no brasil. [link], Accessed: 03 August 2024.

BRAZIL (2018). Lei nº 13.709, lei geral de proteção de dados pessoais (lgpd). [link], Accessed: 03 August 2024.

CGI.br (2023). Pesquisa sobre o uso da internet por crianças e adolescentes no brasil: Tic kids online brasil. [link], Accessed: 03 August 2024.

de Paula Albuquerque, O., Fantinato, M., Hung, P. C., Peres, S. M., Iqbal, F., Rehman, U., and Shah, M. U. (2022). Recommendations for a smart toy parental control tool. The Journal of Supercomputing, 78(8):11156–11194. DOI: https://doi.org/1010.1007/s11227-022-04319-4.

Fantinato, M., Hung, P. C. K., Jiang, Y., Roa, J., Villarreal, P., Melaisi, M., and Amancio, F. (2017). A Survey on Purchase Intention of Hello Barbie in Brazil and Argentina, pages 21–34. Springer International Publishing, Cham. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62072-5_3.

Ghosh, A. K., Hughes, C. E., and Wisniewski, P. J. (2020). Circle of trust: a new approach to mobile online safety for families. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 1–14.

Mariya Stoilova, M. B. and Livingstone, S. (2024). Do parental control tools fulfil family expectations for child protection? a rapid evidence review of the contexts and outcomes of use. Journal of Children and Media, 18(1):29–49. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/17482798.2023.2265512.

Matos, M. C. (2021). Redes sociais para crianças menores de 13 anos: qual o impacto? [link], Accessed: 03 August 2024.

Meta. Family center tools for instagram. [link], Accessed: 03 August 2024.

Meta. How services and tools from meta support age-appropriate experiences. [link], Accessed: 03 August 2024.

Meta. Instagram help center privacy settings & information. [link], Accessed: 03 August 2024.

Meta. Instagram help center: Tips for parents. [link], Accessed: 03 August 2024.

Meta. Instagram shopping feature. [link], Accessed: 03 August 2024.

Meta. Our tools, features and resources to help support teens and parents. [link], Accessed: 03 August 2024.

Nouwen, M., Jafarinaimi, N., and Zaman, B. (2017). Parental controls: reimagining technologies for parent-child interaction. In Proceedings of 15th European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work - Exploratory Papers, pages 18–34. European Society for Socially Embedded Technologies (EUSSET). DOI: https://doi.org/10.18420/ecscw2017-28.

Pasquale, L., Zippo, P., Curley, C., O’Neill, B., and Mongiello, M. (2022). Digital age of consent and age verification: Can they protect children? IEEE Software, 39(3):50–57. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/MS.2020.3044872.

Penina, M. (2017). Telas e crianças: conheça os mitos e riscos desta exposição. [link], Accessed: 03 August 2024.

Serra, A. C., Mendes, P. R. C., de Freitas, P. V. A., Busson, A. J. G., Álan L. V. Guedes, and Colcher, S. (2021). Should i see or should i go: Automatic detection of sensitive media in messaging apps. In Anais do XXVII Simpósio Brasileiro de Sistemas Multimídia e Web, pages 229–236, Porto Alegre, RS, Brasil. SBC. [link], Accessed: 03 August 2024.

Smirnova, S., Livingstone, S., and Stoilova, M. (2021). Understanding of user needs and problems: A rapid evidence review of age assurance and parental controls. TikTok. Tiktok: Guardian’s guide. [link], Accessed: 03 August 2024.

TikTok. Tiktok: Privacy and security on tiktok. [link], Accessed: 03 August 2024.

TikTok. Tiktok: Privacy policy for younger users. [link], Accessed: 03 August 2024.

TikTok. Tiktok: Safety privacy & controls. [link], Accessed: 03 August 2024.

TikTok. Tiktok shop. [link], Accessed: 03 August 2024.

TikTok (2019). Tiktok for younger users. [link], Accessed: 03 August 2024.

TikTok (2020). Tiktok introduces family pairing. [link], Accessed: 03 August 2024.

Tove Lafton, J. E. B. W. and Holmarsdottir, H. B. (2024). Parental mediation and children’s digital well-being in family life in norway. Journal of Children and Media, 0(0):1–18. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/17482798.2023.2299956.

UNICEF (2019). Growing up in a connected world, unicef office of research – innocenti, florence. [link], Accessed: 03 August 2024.

United Nations (1989). Convention on the rights of the child. [link], Accessed: 03 August 2024.

Wisniewski, P., Ghosh, A. K., Xu, H., Rosson, M. B., and Carroll, J. M. (2017). Parental control vs. teen self-regulation: Is there a middle ground for mobile online safety? In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW ’17, page 51–69, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2998181.2998352.

Zaman, B., Nouwen, M., Vanattenhoven, J., de Ferrerre, E., and Looy, J. V. (2016). A qualitative inquiry into the contextualized parental mediation practices of young children’s digital media use at home. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 60(1):1–22. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2015.1127240.