Playing for Privacy Awareness: Learning from a "Wow-Moment" with iBuddy

Abstract

iBuddy is a narrative game-based simulation session inspired by research evidence and designed to enhance secondary school and higher education students' privacy awareness. Students enter the simulation through storytelling and are asked to install the iBuddy app. Later in the simulation, students discover that some of their personal information have been extracted from their devices and manipulated - and this generates a wow-effect that sparks questions and discussions. The simulation is backed-up by a lively debriefing phase, supported by original animation videos, interactive activities, and small group games. To overcome privacy issues, iBuddy sessions are played on a local network and the collected data, which are anonymous, are deleted before the end of the session. iBuddy exploits an original software, released as open source, with a layered architecture composed by app, server and operator interface. The system also includes an Artificial Intelligence filter for inappropriate content. Multilingual class materials are published under a Creative Commons license and are available on the www.protectyourdata.ch platform. Post-session assessments collected from over 970 students indicate that they enjoy iBuddy sessions and learn from it. Follow-up assessment data, collected on a portion of the participants, also suggest that iBuddy sessions are effective and conducive to medium-term behavioral change.