Circle of Trust: A New Approach to Mobile Online Safety for Families
Abstract
Traditional parental control applications designed to protect children and teens from online risks do so through parental restrictions and privacy-invasive monitoring. We propose a new approach to adolescent online safety that aims to strike a balance between a teen's privacy and their online safety through active communication and fostering trust between parents and children. We designed and developed an Android "app" called Circle of Trust and conducted a mixed methods user study of 17 parent-child pairs to understand their perceptions about the app. Using a within-subjects experimental design, we found that parents and children significantly preferred our new app design over existing parental control apps in terms of perceived usefulness, ease of use, and behavioral intent to use. By applying a lens of Value Sensitive Design to our interview data, we uncovered that parents and children who valued privacy, trust, freedom, and balance of power preferred our app over traditional apps. However, those who valued transparency and control preferred the status quo. Overall, we found that our app was better suited for teens than for younger children.
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Parents are often the primary stakeholders who care the most about their teens' safety and are frequently responsible for making decisions about online risk management, monitoring, and protection.
“Parents are often the primary stakeholders who care the most about their teens' safety and are frequently responsible for making decisions about online risk management, monitoring, and protection [7, 8, 40, 46, 90].”
From From Vulnerable to Resilient: Examining Parent and Teen Perceptions on How to Respond to Unwanted Cybergrooming Advances (2026) · cites this paper as [40]
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“Parents are often the primary stakeholders who care the most about their teens’ safety and are frequently responsible for making decisions about online risk management, monitoring, and protection [7, 8, 40, 46, 90].”
Self-citation
- Authors
- Ghosh, A. K., Hughes, C. E., & Wisniewski, P. J.
- Affiliations
- Jacksonville State University (US)
- University of Central Florida (US)
- University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA
- ORCID
- Hughes, Charles E.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2020-04-21
- Pages
- 1-14
- OpenAlex
- W3029837607
- Cited by
- 75
- References
- 66
- Citations by year
- 2026: 13 · 2025: 16 · 2024: 17 · 2023: 12 · 2022: 7 · 2021: 9 · 2020: 1
- FWCI
- 23.34
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- The U.S. National Science Foundation (CHS-1844881)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Education › Child Development and Digital Technology
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Privacy, Security, and Data Protection
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Innovative Human-Technology Interaction
- Keywords
- parent-child trust, value-sensitive design, mobile application design, perceived usefulness and ease of use, user acceptance, children's online risks
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