Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The present study investigates young children’s reasoning about who owns the information users share with apps. 87 children ages 5-years to 10-years were asked to judge who owned two types of information after it had been willingly shared by users: general and personal information. Based on an informational autonomy account, we predicted that young children would judge that the user owns their personal information but not their general information. We found that by 8-years-old children were indeed more likely to judge that users own the personal information they share with apps than they were to judge that users own the general information they share with them. However, younger children judged that the general information was owned by the user at similar rates to the personal information. Further exploration of our data suggests these changes are likely driven by beliefs about the ownership of general information.