Children's Privacy and the Justification of ICT-based Parental Monitoring

Abstract: As Information and Communication technology (ICT) has rapidly advanced in China, parental monitoring may invasively penetrate into children's privacy, while China is lagging behind on the issue of children privacy protection. Privacy is invaluable to human development, and children do have interests in their privacy. This thesis is going to investigate under which condition it is desirable for parents to apply ICT techniques to monitor children, which does not invade children's privacy. Before reaching the decision of carrying out monitoring, the intent and the necessity of monitoring should be considered. Children should be informed and their consent should be acquired before deploying monitoring. After the decision is made, the proportionality of monitoring practice requires parents to opt for the least invasive and the most necessary approach. Besides parental monitoring, states and schools can offer media literacy education to enable children to protect themselves from privacy infringement.