Pupils in years 7 and 8 have been looking at issues surrounding privacy and consent when using the Internet.  Although International “Safer Internet Day” gives us a good excuse, internet safety is a key topic no matter what the time of year!

Pupils watched a music video featuring spoken word artist, Christian Foley, and dancers from the Street Factory studio in Plymouth. This film encourages the pupils to think carefully about what they share online, what consent they give and what we expect from others. A good discussion ensued about various social media networks and the types of data they store.  This threw up one or two surprises. One example is that 400 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every second. The huge servers needed to store all this data must be immense!

“Big data” is big news in the media of late, especially in relation to the work of Cambridge Analytica and their involvement in the American Presidential elections and the UK Brexit Referendum, where they used data from social media networks without consent to target voters. Many organisations, not just technology giants, store huge amounts of data about all of us.  It is important that we are well informed and know what they are doing with this data.