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Collection and Use of Personal Data through the Internet – Points to Note for Data Users Targeting at Children / December 2015
Best Practice Tips
• Data users should offer discussion forums that would enforce previewing of contents before they are
posted, in order to encourage children to think twice before posting; and
• Data users should remind children that, despite the ability to delete posts and to use restrictive privacy
settings on the forums to limit sharing, any other members they permit to access that information may
easily copy and repost the information to public forums in a way that the children would have no control
over.
Getting parental involvement
Data users should encourage children to involve their parents or teachers when collecting personal data from them.
This will not only earn the trust of the children, but also of their parents and teachers. As a result, this will help
strengthen the reputation of the data users.
Best Practice Tip
• Data users should ask children, particularly younger ones at primary school age and below, to consult
parents or teachers when providing their personal data online.
Deleting account or personal data
Children may be ready to experiment with new online platforms but may not be aware of their rights to have
personal data removed. If such a removal process is cumbersome, children may not be able to understand it. Data
users should, therefore, ensure that children are well informed of their rights and offer them with an easy and online
way to completely remove personal data they have supplied to the data users or disclosed on such platforms.
Tips
• If an online platform requires children to create accounts before using its services, data users should
offer a readily accessible and user-friendly means for account holders to remove the account and all
associated data collected by the data users;
• Similarly, even if the child does not need to create an account, but the data users nevertheless collects
his personal data by online means, data users should inform him of the collection of data and his
relevant rights, as well as providing an online means for the child to request the deletion of collected
personal data; and
• As a best practice, data users offering forums to be used by children should provide means for children
to delete the contents they have posted before removing their accounts.