Digital Redlining, Access, and Privacy | Common Sense Education

"Nina is a contemporary community college student enrolled in a composition class that explores issues of surveillance, privacy, and online identity. She participates in a class discussion of revenge porn, and she decides that it offers a topic for exploring the connection between the digital world and issues of gender, power, and free speech. She goes to one of the computer labs and does a quick search.

Her effort proves unproductive. It produces information about ABC's hit show Revenge but nothing about what everyone reading this column understands "revenge porn" to mean. For Nina, the concept doesn't exist -- not because the Internet contains no information on revenge porn but because Nina's version of the Internet is filtered. Because the filters between her and the Internet block access to information, she reasonably believes that the issue is marginal and that other topics might prove more fruitful. She moves on to something else, unaware of the invisible walls erected that prevent her from accessing information that might allow her to do her I am work. The student has been digitally redlined, walled off from information based on the IT policies of her institution...."