For Parents: Did You Know That Your Child Has A Digital Dossier?

Recently, we came across a very powerful, four and a half minute video about digital dossiers, produced by the Digital Natives group at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The 2008 video, created by Kanupriya Tewari, takes a unique look at our online personas and traces our digital footprints from pre-birth to after-death.

“Just about all of us have a digital dossier, but many of us have no idea what it even is,” says the narrator in the video. The voice continues, “Your dossier is the accumulation of all the digital tracks that you leave behind, and this accumulation did not just start last week, month, or even year. It started before you were even born.”

The video takes the viewer on a journey with a fictional character named “Andy” so that we may see exactly how Andy’s digital identity is created (from birth) and modified as he grows older. Andy’s digital dossier includes photographs posted on Flickr, personal information shared on Facebook, Google searches, Amazon book purchases, credit card transactions, GPS data collected by his cell phone carrier, additional personal details included on his blog, and more.

The Digital Natives video is an eye-opening viewing experience for individuals who are unaware of the vast amount of information that is connected to them and stored digitally. We encourage both teachers and parents to share this visual representation about digital dossiers with children and teenagers. Our hope is that it will help them to understand how online identities are created and change over time. With this knowledge, teens and kids alike will have a new appreciation for the importance of monitoring their online reputations, and pay close attention to the information they share digitally from this point forward.

You can also read more about Digital Dossiers on NetFamilyNews.org, written by Anne Collier (who also participates on SafetyWeb's Product Advisory Council). We're glad that there is so much interest from educators, parents and industry leaders in helping promote awareness about the important of knowing exactly what your child's digital profile contains, and what affect that might have on their future.

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