In this episode of Digital Dominoes, host Angeline Corvaglia speaks with Christer Veland, a parent from Oslo, Norway, who has become a privacy advocate for children in schools. With a background in IT and tech, Christer sheds light on privacy concerns related to the use of iPads in classrooms, sharing his personal journey from discovering inappropriate content on his child's device to advocating for better digital safeguards. The discussion covers the challenges of protecting children's data, the importance of competent privacy measures, and practical advice for non-tech-savvy parents on how to safeguard their children's digital lives.

00:00 Introduction

to Digital Privacy for Children

00:33 Meet Christer Veland: A Tech-Savvy Parent

02:09 The iPad Incident: A Turning Point

04:03 Fighting for Privacy: From Local to National

06:46 Technical Solutions and Challenges

15:14 The Broader Impact on Education

22:41 Practical Advice for Parents

25:03 Conclusion and Call to Action

Christer mentions these tools/websites in the episode:

• Adguard: https://adguard.com/en/welcome.html
• https://amiunique.org/ Learn how identifiable you are on the Internet

We can also recommend these articles that explain the issue of content and data sharing.

• Aimed at teens: What You Should Know About School Technology and Data Sharing - Data Girl and Friends
• Aimed at parents: Tech at School: Protecting Your Child's Privacy - ANGELINE CORVAGLIA

In addition, we also recommend these resources:

• Me2B Alliance Product Testing Report on School Mobile Apps Student Data Sharing Behavior: https://internetsafetylabs.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/school-apps-data-sharing-behavior-spotlight-report-final.pdf
• Edtech law center's resources on issues with edtech: https://edtech.law/issues-with-edtech/

By sharing them, We aim to [00:00:30] motivate other parents to do the same. Today I'm talking to Christer Veland in Oslo, Norway, and thank you for being here. Thank you for inviting me. And what I find really interesting about your background is that you actually have a tech background, so you're able to see this whole privacy issue from a different perspective, which I'm looking forward to sharing with others.

But after having kids, you start to think about consequences in a different way. And then your kids are suddenly getting into space where they want their own devices. You're starting to, Maybe borrowing your, your own [00:01:30] iPads to the, to the kids and things to play games and yeah, do fun stuff when they're, when they're young and you don't think much about privacy in that sense.

The same time I'm giving devices to my own kids. And then when my oldest daughter were in third grade here in Norway, there was a big change. Well, we basically got a letter from school saying that we've been using iPads in the classroom for two weeks. And that was the first message. They already been using it for two weeks.

So very fast, we basically replaced school books [00:03:00] with the iPads in my municipality and, and my school. And that created a whole lot of other worries of course as well, when it comes to learning and all sorts of things. But I particularly took a step into the privacy and setting up good boundaries when it comes to what should kids in third grade access on the internet basically in the classroom.

Yeah, it is, it is. So the reaction from the Norwegian school was basically, I'm sorry your kid was experiencing trauma. If the kid needs someone to talk to, we're here. And I'm like, well, we're here too. We'll talk to our kid. That's no problem. What I need you guys to do is to start closing down the open internet and having good privacy [00:04:00] and understand what you actually roll out to the kids, basically.

That took like a full year to process then in the department. So that means like 18 months later, sort of the process was complete. And that process ended up with the guidance, basically, in written form, where instead of having like a filter by law, like all municipalities [00:05:00] needs to have this basic filter in place, they only were given this description on, well, you should have it in place.

How you do it, that's up to you. That's where it ended up. I was just talking to Daniel in Spain about how Google was negotiating directly with his school. And it seems, once again, quite a power imbalance, these schools. I mean, they don't have that expertise. The schools to, to understand even how to protect the internet.

So we haven't really got the answer. much further than what we did in 2017. How long is that, like seven years? Seven, almost eight years? And we're [00:06:00] still almost at the same point. And what does it boil down to? Well, it boils down to lack of competence, basically. And the municipalities, they, they have no chance of getting this competence because there are too few people who can sort of work in the municipalities with this.

That was [00:07:00] so fascinating for me. Yeah. I could tell a little bit about that because it started with me getting tired of writing chronicles in the newspapers and I started building a network with different professionals and we're all writing chronicles about sort of the symptoms and the problems and kind of like the whole society is doing at this point in time, right?

And that's what I've been doing. I've sort of been traveling here and there, in and around Oslo, to different municipalities, probably 5-6 different ones, testing iPads and PCs. Don't think I've tested Chromebooks yet. I will, probably, very soon. And then I could have, let's take an example in Drammen. Took a first grade iPad.[00:08:00]

Basically connected to my router and then I only have that iPad connected to the router. So basically everything I see of traffic in that router is the iPad and nothing else, basically. And then I connect the router to a system I use personally, AdGuard, which has a great DNS service. What that means is that all the traffic that goes through AdGuard and my router is then analyzed by AdGuard.

And AdGuard is really good at categorizing all this type of traffic. So what I get from plugging in my phone [00:09:00] or an iPad or any device that's connected to the web, I can actually count the number of phonebook lookups or data exchanges that goes to the advertising networks or to the actual server where I'm interested in getting the content.

If they don't want to do schoolwork, they always go to these, spillespille. no is one of them that we call in Norway. There are tons of them. And we go to different Google searches and YouTube and we browse a bit like a kid. So we talk to the parents about how the kids use the iPad and so on. And then after an hour, we go in to AdGuard and look at [00:10:00] this, at the statistics.

Well, this is the iPad who is sending traffic to the advertisement networks that can happen in two ways. One way is that you actively go into let's let's say you take a newspaper that has advertisements, right? Then you, we all see visible advertisements on that newspaper. It can be, when you're scrolling down, it can be on the sides, it can be everywhere, right?

Or in the apps? That is 90 percent of that traffic. And these kids have not given a consent. To collect this data and when you think about it, well, you could always think, well, the kids are not logged in. [00:11:30] So how do they know who it is? Well, they know who it is based on IP addresses. That's sort of the easiest way.

So basically you're almost logged in without being logged in, right? So it's, it's not very hard to collect this data and aggregate it on your machine. And then over time, we understand that this is the same person, basically moving between three IP addresses. It could be a home, it could be a school, maybe some, some other place.

So when I tell them, they block it. And that's interesting. So basically what it boils down to is like, this is lack of competence. This is lack of knowledge. [00:13:00] They don't know about the advertisement networks. They don't know enough about privacy, in general, and they don't know enough about the possible technical solutions to this, because it's possible.

And that will basically take away all third party traffic. So that is, we have now two municipalities who's testing the whitelist filter. And that means you basically just go through a list where you approve all the sites and the apps, Background servers that should be possible to access from [00:14:00] especially the youngest kids.

Now there's clear recommendation from the government to do this from first to seventh grade. And that will effectively just open the sites you're supposed to access. And all the advertisement networks won't be able to to be accessed from the apps. So that that is very effective. This has been a long and tedious work.

I mean, just press that button or whitelist. That's the two options, right? So yeah. Wow. That's, that's where we are. It's always nice to talk to like a tech expert on these things as well, right? Like I, I didn't know that about AgGuard and pushing the button and making it stop. You would [00:15:00] think that it would be done, I mean, I don't know, I'm speechless right now.

But there was another thing you told me that I want to talk about because I quoted it actually in the episode that's airing tomorrow for the first time. When your school switched to iPads, you were mentioning your experience in digital transformation. That's the way, that's not a best practice.

I know algorithmic thinking and all these terms that they try to bring into school. To be honest, I'm more worried about all the other subjects, like all the other things that we need in society. Like we need people in healthcare [00:16:00] and to build, construct buildings and everything. But now we basically just threw out all the basic knowledge and the basic learning in Norwegian school.

And we went into the big promise that everything is going to be solved by AI. Personal learning on the iPad and on the screen, basically. So we went like super fast into throwing out all the practical stuff, throwing out basic mathematics and things and sort of hoping that the mathematics apps will help the kid.

Like basic, how do you think, how do you write, how do you calculate in between the task and the answer, all these basic stuff. How do you [00:17:00] use a pencil with it? They, they just stopped learning all of this in school very, very rapid. I believe this had great consequence now for many kids in Norway. We sort of have a lost generation when it comes to the way it was introduced.

And who's the user? It's a, it's a student, right? And also the students, together with the teacher and the parents. So, but the student was never involved in this digitalization. This was a top down approach. This was something that the politicians wanted. Because they said, uh, well, We'll basically be proud of ourselves [00:18:00] because we digitalized Norwegian school.

And they did it just by acquiring devices. And then they were done. And that's terrible, right? That's no way to digitalize. You have to do inside work. You have to understand the needs. You have to understand if it benefits more than what they have from before. You need to understand the friction points and where is value and you have to use it right.

As a society, we're used to doing things for kids, but in the digital society, we [00:19:00] can't do that anymore. They have to be much more like empowered and involved. And the way you describe it makes that so clear because you wouldn't do that in an office because you want the company to keep running. And so it should be the same kind of process, right?

There is no way for parents to log into these systems. Well, there could be, because [00:20:00] on the technical side everything is possible, right? But the people who roll it out and decide on the setup and how to do this, really haven't given parent access to the schoolwork. That also goes for the youngest kids, so you basically have to force your kid to tell him or her the password.

It's been taken away a bit with the digital solutions, which is lacking features on this basically to, to properly work with school home collaboration, which is some, it's, it's very highly regarded in Norway. They talk a lot, a lot about this home school collaboration. [00:21:00] And one of the consequences of digitalizing and not being able to answer about privacy and content filtering and all these basic criterias.

So this needs to be corrected. I mean, we need to rebalance that so that it can, you know, work really well again because that's one of the biggest success criterias for school. I would say. Well, I would say too, I hope you continue to move slowly, unfortunately, in Norway, hopefully it will speed up your, hopefully it will speed up your success.

We have  a minister digital, a ministry of digitalization in Norway and they just gave me a huge report. As I say, we have a goal in Norway to be the most digitalized country in, by 2030, actually. If we're not already, so, uh, yeah, we'll see how it [00:22:30] goes. We need to do it properly. We need to take care of the kids.

Yeah. Yeah. We need to learn from you the rest of the world. Is it either laugh or cry, right? It's both. It's really both.

I mean, if you want to look up that one, it's AdGuard DNS. I think you could start with a free plan. And I don't think I pay much. I'll put it into this show notes, actually. Also the other one you mentioned as well. Yeah, you also have NextDNS and you have, you have, uh, ControlD. You have a lot of different things out there to DNS services that can help you.

So I can see all this. I can see all the stats. So I basically see how many data connections our family is, is using every week or every month. I can't see what everyone is doing, but I kind of see what kind of websites or domains that we use, right? [00:24:00] And there is also good parent restrictions you can put on, you can put on SafeSearch on Google.

You have these upsides as well. But the main thing is that you learn about how much data and where your data is going on an everyday basis, which is like super great knowledge. And this will probably give you the same idea as I could probably test my kids iPads at school or the PC and you can start to sort of be that person locally as well.

If your school or area hasn't yet leaned heavily into technology at school, please do so now. We hope these stories will help you ask the right questions when they do. If you have a story to share, would like more info on these issues, or would like to contribute in any way, please [00:25:30] contact us. Together we can make a difference in safeguarding our children's digital futures.