Parents' Perceptions of Privacy Policies and Practices for School-Issued Digital Devices: Implications for School Practices.

BACKGROUND: Digital technology is becoming a central component of schooling. We measured parents perceptions of their children's digital privacy on school-issued digital devices. METHODS: We surveyed 571 parents of K-12th grade children, recruited nationally, regarding their child's use of school-issued devices. Parents reported their awareness of, and ratings of importance for, seven types of privacy policies for school-issued devices. RESULTS: About half (45.9%) of children were in K-5th grade and 84.9% attended public school. Most (80.7%) children used a school-issued device and 66.6% took one home during the coronavirus pandemic. Parents most often rated policies for preventing the collection of geolocation (76%) and sharing of data with third parties (75%) as "very important." However, 35.4% of parents did not know with certainty if their school had any digital policies. Many (55.7%) parents "strongly agreed" their child's school protected student digital privacy and most (68.1%) felt schools were the most responsible party to do so, yet those ratings differed by parent awareness of privacy policies (p < .05). CONCLUSIONS: Parents consider digital privacy policies highly important and perceive schools to be responsible for such protections, highlighting the need to support schools in those efforts.

Promotion of Meal Premiums in Child-Directed TV Advertising for Children's Fast-food Meals.

BACKGROUND: Fast-food intake is a modifiable obesity risk factor in early childhood, and child-directed fast-food marketing is common. Per self-regulatory guidelines regarding deception, premiums (ie, incentives or toy giveaways) in child-directed advertisements must be secondary to the advertised product. METHODS: Content analyses were performed of all child-directed fast-food television (TV) advertisements aired on four national US children's TV networks, February 1, 2019, through January 31, 2020, to assess the emphasis of premiums relative to food. We quantified the percent of the audio transcript (word count) and visual airtime (seconds) that included premiums or food and the on-screen size of premiums relative to food in randomly selected frames from each advertisement. RESULTS: There were 28 unique child-directed advertisements for children's fast-food meals in the study year; 27 advertisements were from one restaurant and accounted for nearly all (99.8%) of the total airtime for the 28 advertisements. Premiums were present in 27 of the 28 unique advertisements. On average, premiums (versus food) accounted for 53.0% (vs 16.0%) of words in the audio transcript and 59.2% (vs 54.3%) of the visual airtime per advertisement. In the random subset of frames that includes both premiums and food imagery, imagery of premiums accounted for 9.7% (95% CI: 6.4%-13.0%) of the on-screen area, whereas imagery of food accounted for 5.7% (95% CI: 4.4%-7.0%), an average ratio of 1.9:1 within each frame when excluding one large outlier. CONCLUSIONS: Child-directed fast-food TV advertisements emphasize premiums over food in violation of self-regulatory guidelines, counter to childhood obesity prevention efforts.