Teach Online Privacy Early, Say Google Execs in "The New Digital Age"

Never mind the birds and the bees. It's the "online talk" that kids need to hear first.

That's what two Google executives write in the new book The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business. 

And when top guns at Google say teaching kids about online privacy and security should come even before sex education, you might want to listen. They know a thing or two, after all, about collecting personal information online.

"Whether you're in New York or Saudi Arabia or a part of Asia, educating the next generation as they're coming online young and fast is going to be important, regardless of what kind of society it is," Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas, told NPR's "All Tech Considered" this week.

Cohen, a counterterrorism expert and former State Department adviser, teamed up with Google's executive chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt to write The New Digital Age, out today. The book lays out a vision of what the near future will look like in an increasingly "connected" world.

"Parents will have to talk to their kids about online privacy and security *years* before they talk to them about the birds and the bees," reads a post on the Facebook page for The New Digital Age. "Online privacy and security will be taught alongside health class."

Schmidt and Cohen say that kids today are part of a generation unlike any that came before it when it comes to virtual identities and permanent online profiles.

"The parent sits there and says, 'There's really no delete button for what my 10-year-old or 11-year-old is about to post, and I really don't want this following them for the next 50 years,'" Schmidt told NPR.

"From birth till your death now, going forward, your online profile will be shaped more and more by online events, what people say about you, and it will be very difficult for you to control that," he said. "And so the reality is that a child growing up today will find more and more of the things said about them and the things they do accumulate over time. We'll all, of course, deal with that as a society, and there will be a change in social mores. But the fact of the matter is that our generation never had this problem."

From The New Digital Age Facebook page

Cohen said he and Schmidt met with parents across the world as they conducted research for their new book. In the process, they came to a greater appreciation of the importance of teaching online privacy to kids.

For more on The New Digital Age and the authors' forecasts, both bleak and hopeful—and on Google's own troubles with privacy (they've been sued repeatedly over privacy concerns)—see this Huffington Post review. 

And for more on the authors' journeys to various autocratic regimes, and what might happen as 5 billion more people log onto the Internet in the coming decades, joining the 2 billion already online, listen to this second discussion with "All Tech Considered." The authors explore such questions as What will the Internet in Burma look like? and Will North Korea ever really be online?