NGI0: Teach the Teachers on Dangers of (Mass) Datafication
Work on Privacy Tech Dossier
Since January 2025 ISOC-CH is working on privacy-focused Tech Dossiers (TD), which relate to various projects which are technically supported by Next Generation Internet (NGI) funding, provided by the EU Commission and the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) of the Swiss Confederation (cf. https://www.sbfi.admin.ch/sbfi/en/home/seri/seri.html). In scope of this work, also the Artificial Intelligence (AI) topic was given special attention as to show how to make a more sovereign use of its potentials without neglecting the risks associated to the intensified practice in datafication of everything (including the collection and use of Personal Identifiable Information, PII) to make those systems generate (sometimes useful) answers.
Teaching the Teachers on Privacy
As an audience, we choose to raise awareness among early stage secondary school teachers in their last step of formation about the dangers of datafication, which (soon) will have the job to teach their topic (e.g., German or Mathematics) on secondary schools across Switzerland. As teaching is done more and more interdisciplinary and with an increasing relation to digitization, teachers are formed at University of Zurich (UZH) also in aspects of digital educational tools used in teaching. From our perspective, it’s absolutely vital that at least young teachers get themselves and critically taught in aspects of digitization such that they can raise awareness among kids about it and we can have a scalable effect on spreading critical knowledge on privacy implications of digital systems, increasing thus media literacy in the general public and give insights to alternatives which can be used.
Concrete Teacher Audience at University of Zurich
To start this task, we teamed up with Tessa Consoli, Academic Associate to the Chair of Prof. Dr. Dominik Petko on Teaching and Educational Technology of the UZH in the Institute of Education (IfE; cf. https://www.ife.uzh.ch/en/research/petko/staff/consolitessa.html), researching on aspects of the influence and use of digitization in the secondary school system. Since Spring Semester 2025, she runs a course on Transversal Learning including a strong focus on digitization topics in schools (cf. course description: https://studentservices.uzh.ch/uzh/anonym/vvz/?sap-language=DE&sap-ui-language=DE#/details/2024/004/SM/51260439). With her work, the IfE is assessing which technologies are being used in the secondary school system across Switzerland, running surveys (cf. corresponding research work: https://www.ife.uzh.ch/en/research/petko.html).
First Efforts with a Presentation and Reactions
As the course lecturer Tessa sees and shares the interest to shed light not only on chances, but also on the risks of the ongoing pervasive (mass) datafication — including the loss of digital sovereignty in the public school system —, we were invited to do an intervention in her course on 18.3.2025 (cf. in PDF: slides), not only showing the problematic global situation of mass datafication through, e.g., means of state-led Mass Surveillance as shown — at the very latest — since the Snowden revelations as of June 2013 (cf. RFC7258 titled “Pervasive Monitoring Is An Attack” from the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF): https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7258.html) , but also how to engage in self-defense by learning about Media Literacy and by using technological tools for a more decentralized and private Internet, whereas lots of them receive funding from the NGI framework (like, e.g., Mastodon as an alternative approach to (decentralized; here: federated) Social Media, Tor as to anonymize Internet traffic, circumvent Internet censorship and hide Internet services or Jitsi as video conferencing tool which can be self-hosted, allowing schools or state entities of certain sizes and with corresponding budgets to engage in digital sovereignty).
The intervention at UZH proved to be very useful as the teachers present weren’t generally aware of the scope of the (non-consensual) datafication going on, which happens to be used, e.g., in AI systems as training material, imposing privacy risks of data leakage and loss of control over the own life through automatic decision-making, based on PII saved at the state or hold and used by (rating) companies. Awareness at which points data gets collected by own actions was also not very sharp: most people weren’t aware that “simple” news sites massively collect behavioral data and share it with hundreds of “partners” — a problem which can be reduced by using certain Add-Ons or Browser Bundles (most important in the case of smart phones, as web browsers and most apps happen to miss a concept for extensions) to share less data by technical means. The presentation was characterized by an engaged and interactive mode, showing the interest. Discussions inside the course and with individual teachers in the aftermath underlined the importance to us that such knowledge must be distributed further and there’s a need to work on scalable approaches to do so.
