“I think privacy is often given a bad name. We talk about it in abstract terms; we should abandon thinking about it in that way. What you do to my data, you do to me. There is no real distinction anymore between our online life and our offline life. So whatever you know about me through my digital footprint, you know about my real life.”
Jen Persson, Director of Defend Digital Me
Children today are growing up in a world where almost everything they do leaves a data trail. From the apps they use, to the schools they attend and the healthcare they receive; data is being collected, analysed and increasingly connected and shared.
But at what cost?
Recent initiatives from the UK Government, such as the Schools White Paper and the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026, have major implications for children’s privacy; from age verification to plans for a “Data Spine” to link information across the public sector.
In our latest Guardians of Data podcast, we analyse the Government’s plans for our children’s data, discuss children’s privacy in the internet age and the role Big Tech is playing in the collection storage and analysis of all our data. We ask if the government is simply trying to do a better job of protecting children or if it is quietly building a surveillance system which will impact all of us.
Our guest is Jen Persson, Director of Defend Digital Me, a not-for- profit organisation that advocates for children’s privacy and digital rights in UK education and the wider public sector. Jen said:
“Everybody wants to keep children safe… I think the important thing in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools [Act], is that there is so much going through it that is untested and unevidenced. So some of our work has been to analyse that as it went through Parliament. For example, the single unique identifier is only part of the data aspects of the [Act], but it’s very vague and there’s been very little explanation in writing or in Parliament.”
Listen on your preferred platform via our podcast page, or download the episode directly.
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Previous episodes of the Guardians of Data podcast have featured Tahir Latif talking about responsible AI deployment, Naomi Mathews and Ibrahim Hasan explaining the law on filming people in public for social media, Maurice Frenkel looking back at 20 years of the Freedom of Information Act and Olu Odeniyi analysing recent cyber breaches and discussing the lessons learnt.
