14th May 2019
How might we...
...Provide teens with a safe environment without feeling watched by creating collaborative privacy controls?
Making parental control less invasive & more educational
Vidi allows parents to simply and comprehensively set up and maintain privacy settings and data sharing preferences for their teens, also providing tips on how to co-manage their digital habits.
Product Context
Vidi is a video streaming product that creates a feed of live and other video content based on you and your friends’ viewing behaviours.
In order to provide the service, Vidi is powered by some of the following data, including inferred interests based on:
- Videos you've watched
- Videos you've liked
- Videos your friends have watched
- Self-expressed preferences
Problem & Opportunity
Juan has a 12 year old daughter, Valentina, whose online privacy he is very concerned about. She wants to use a new video streaming app that all her friends are on, but Juan wants the ability to set up her privacy settings and monitor the ways in which the service is targeting her with videos.
Parents want to make sure their kids are watching safe content, but don’t want to be invasive or feel guilty for doing so.
Policy makers, legal experts and designers prototyping together
Design Features
Reviewing Behaviors
Remote parental control Parents and teens have separate accounts to enjoy Vidi. Juan can link his account to Valentina’s in order to have remote parental control. This allows him to establish his daughter’s preferences as well as her security and privacy settings according to what he deems appropriate. In order to review her activity on the platform, he can access a privacy dashboard within his own account.
From the privacy dashboard, Juan can - at a glance - see how Vidi's machine-learning algorithm is updating Valentina's preferences based on her viewing behaviour, including how many hours she's spent on the app this week and exactly which videos are in her feed. Juan has full control and the ability to remove interests, edit the number of hours she can watch and remove videos from her feed, if necessary.
Design Features
Contextual privacy controls and educational notices
Video history includes additional information on tap: for each video Juan can see is in Valentina's feed, Vidi will explain exactly which data it is using to serve that video. Based on that information, Juan can easily update his daughter's privacy settings and data sharing preferences. In addition to this layer of transparency, some details are paired with educational insights and tips on how to talk about video categories that he has prohibited, or limitations on the time she has spent on the app.
Next steps
- How might we allow teens to auto-regulate with safe boundaries?
- How might we detect when parental controls are being bypassed?
