6th-8th
Your Private Data
with Common Sense Education
Embedded Files
Essential Question:
How do companies collect and use data about you?
Learning Objective
Warm Up: Data Collection
Explain that the most important questions you might ask are related to teenagers themselves: What do they need? What do they like? What's important to them?
Explain that this is actually how companies and individuals think when they're designing products. For their products to be successful, first they need to know what consumers need, like, and want. Define consumer as a person who buys products or services to use.
How do you think companies go about figuring that out? How do they learn what people will want to buy?
Invite students to share their ideas. Explain that companies often do surveys of consumers as well as focus groups (talking to people), and they look at online data. Define data as any type of information that can be collected, categorized, and analyzed.
What kinds of data do you think companies look at the most?
Explain that one common type of data is online behavioral data: Companies want to know what their customers like to do, which sites they visit, and which other products they buy. They use this information to design new products and to market existing products to new customers.
For example, if a company that makes cat food learns that a lot of their customers also buy dog food, they might start making dog food themselves, or they might start putting advertisements for dog food near the cat food, or they might do both.
Activity: Create Threadmeister
There are many ways that companies get behavioral data: from their own websites, from other companies' websites, and from companies that collect data about people's online behaviors. Today we're going to learn more about how this works.
Wrap It Up: Set A Limit
Even though you might appreciate that companies use behavioral information about you to make products you want, there also can be a downside: Companies will often use this information to do targeted advertising, which is when apps or websites use information they have collected about you to show you certain types of advertisements.
Targeted advertising can be helpful to people, but it can also sometimes cause people to buy things they don't need and/or can't afford. It also makes them more vulnerable to identity theft because there is more risk of private information being stolen.
Exit Ticket
Have students complete this online quiz. They can choose to 'continue preview' to proceed without being assigned by a teacher.
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