In April 2026, the UK's Information Commissioner's Office launched a campaign with a simple and deliberately familiar message: parents should teach their children about online privacy the way they once taught them about road safety. Look before you cross. Do not share your name with strangers. Understand that what you leave behind has consequences.
The analogy is apt. And the research the ICO published alongside it makes clear how wide the gap currently is between knowing that principle and acting on it.
What Parents Know and What They Do
The ICO surveyed 1,000 UK parents of children aged four to eleven in February 2026. Three in four said they feared their child could not make safe online privacy choices. Yet 21 per cent had never spoken to their children about online privacy at all, and 38 per cent discussed it less than once a month.
By contrast, 90 per cent of those same parents had discussed screen time with their child in the past month.
The gap between screen time and privacy as parental concerns is not irrational. Screen time is visible. You can see how long a child has been on a device. Privacy is invisible: you cannot watch a data point leave the room.
What Children Are Sharing
The ICO's data offers some specificity about what is at stake. Twenty-four per cent of children had shared their real name or address online, with eight and nine-year-olds the most at risk. Twenty-two per cent had shared personal information, including health details, with AI tools.
Thirty-five per cent of parents believed their child would share personal information in exchange for game tokens or rewards. The friction between immediate incentive and long-term exposure is not unique to children. But children have less context for understanding what they are trading and less agency to change it later.
Where the Confidence Gap Sits
The ICO research also probed parental preparedness. Forty-six per cent said they did not feel confident protecting their children's privacy online. Forty-four per cent said they tried but were not sure they were doing enough. Forty-two per cent said they probably did not spend enough time checking their child's privacy settings.
What emerges is not indifference. Most parents are aware of the risk, anxious about it, and uncertain about what to do. The road safety analogy works precisely because road safety was never left to parental awareness alone. It was built into pavements, crossings, school curricula, and the design of streets. Awareness was one layer. Infrastructure was another.
The Structural Question
The ICO campaign is asking individuals to compensate for what the platforms have not built in. A nine-year-old who knows not to share their address cannot override a system that was designed to collect and retain it anyway.
What does it mean to extend road safety thinking fully? If we treat the digital environment as a space children occupy, then the question is not only whether they know the rules. It is whether the road was built with them in mind.
Opinion: On the Limits of Literacy
The ICO campaign reflects an honourable instinct: give people the knowledge to protect themselves. But digital literacy has a structural ceiling that road safety education did not face. When a child learns to cross the road, the road does not change its behaviour to extract more from them. It does not personalise the traffic. It does not infer their emotional state from hesitation at the kerb.
The data environment children inhabit does. Twenty-two per cent of children in the ICO's survey had shared health information with an AI tool, most likely without understanding that the system on the other side was designed to retain it.
A constitutional approach to children's data would not start with the question of what parents can teach. It would start with the question of what systems are permitted to infer, retain, and act on, regardless of what a child chose to share. Literacy matters. But literacy without architecture is instruction without infrastructure.
The road safety analogy only holds if we are also willing to build the pavement.
Sources
One click too many? 75% of parents fear their kids aren't making safe choices online — ICO, April 2026
