[00:00:00] Digital dominoes. Hello and welcome to our special series where we share the moving stories of parents who have had to become privacy champions for their children, specifically within the school environment. These stories are about the moments when those parents realized that they needed to take action to protect their children's digital lives at school.

By sharing them, We aim to [00:00:30] motivate other parents to do the same. Today I'm talking to Christer Veland in Oslo, Norway, and thank you for being here. Thank you for inviting me. And what I find really interesting about your background is that you actually have a tech background, so you're able to see this whole privacy issue from a different perspective, which I'm looking forward to sharing with others.

So can you just start and tell us a little bit about how you got to become a parent with a passion for [00:01:00] privacy? I've been working in the IT and tech business for almost 20 years now. So my passion has always been in, in that space between computers and humans. First and foremost, with the UX perspective and sort of bringing, well, building great products and things.

But after having kids, you start to think about consequences in a different way. And then your kids are suddenly getting into space where they want their own devices. You're starting to, Maybe borrowing your, your own [00:01:30] iPads to the, to the kids and things to play games and yeah, do fun stuff when they're, when they're young and you don't think much about privacy in that sense.

But then together with building products, which is like for Norwegian brands and for international brands, been working with media and retail, I've been gradually building knowledge and understanding of how everything works inside a the ecosystems, right? So from the other side? Yeah so I'm, I'm building like [00:02:00] strong marketing, AI controlled apps where we harvest a lot of data from end users.

The same time I'm giving devices to my own kids. And then when my oldest daughter were in third grade here in Norway, there was a big change. Well, we basically got a letter from school saying that we've been using iPads in the classroom for two weeks. And that was the first message. They already been using it for two weeks.

And I have so many questions, right? About that iPad. How do you use it? What's the [00:02:30] privacy? Is internet fully opened? Have you restricted it somehow? Yeah, I had tons of questions, of course. And then I asked my school about it. And I didn't really get any good answers on any of the questions. Basically, it felt like we're just testing it out and see how it works because the government has said that this is coming and municipality has decided that, well, we're going all in on this device, basically.

So very fast, we basically replaced school books [00:03:00] with the iPads in my municipality and, and my school. And that created a whole lot of other worries of course as well, when it comes to learning and all sorts of things. But I particularly took a step into the privacy and setting up good boundaries when it comes to what should kids in third grade access on the internet basically in the classroom.

And two more weeks went and the kids started flashing each other with pornography in the classroom. Which is like, all right, that's enough. I'll, uh, this is [00:03:30] my case now and I'll, I'll take this as far as I have to. In the third grade? Yeah, yeah, sure. Third grade, that's like eight, nine years old in Norway too, right?

Yeah, it is, it is. So the reaction from the Norwegian school was basically, I'm sorry your kid was experiencing trauma. If the kid needs someone to talk to, we're here. And I'm like, well, we're here too. We'll talk to our kid. That's no problem. What I need you guys to do is to start closing down the open internet and having good privacy [00:04:00] and understand what you actually roll out to the kids, basically.

So that started my journey where I'm, this is back in 2017, I wrote this letter with my kids experience, screenshots from with pornography and everything sent to the ministries in Norway. Um, Ministry of Education and to our parliaments and we invited ourselves there to the, to the group that deals with education in the parliaments and, um, well, I would say within a [00:04:30] few months we had a hundred percent vote to introduce what we'll say a content filter for first or fourth grade in elementary school here in Norway.

That took like a full year to process then in the department. So that means like 18 months later, sort of the process was complete. And that process ended up with the guidance, basically, in written form, where instead of having like a filter by law, like all municipalities [00:05:00] needs to have this basic filter in place, they only were given this description on, well, you should have it in place.

How you do it, that's up to you. That's where it ended up. I was just talking to Daniel in Spain about how Google was negotiating directly with his school. And it seems, once again, quite a power imbalance, these schools. I mean, they don't have that expertise. The schools to, to understand even how to protect the internet.

They probably, I mean, Norway has, is a, country with more money than [00:05:30] other countries, but still, do they have money to, to invest in experts? Do this properly? I mean, wow. I'm doing all this on my spare time, voluntarily. I have another day job, of course. Just this autumn, I was talking to the central authorities here in Norway, where they try to still help the municipalities to put this in place.

So we haven't really got the answer. much further than what we did in 2017. How long is that, like seven years? Seven, almost eight years? And we're [00:06:00] still almost at the same point. And what does it boil down to? Well, it boils down to lack of competence, basically. And the municipalities, they, they have no chance of getting this competence because there are too few people who can sort of work in the municipalities with this.

So basically we need to centralize this competence. We need to ensure that the municipalities are hooked into that centralized infrastructure so that this is has a high quality and is has a very good way [00:06:30] of running things over time. And it's still a very long, long way to go. We're still on a paper level on this. I mean, the Norwegian government hasn't built any technology to approach this or set up any technology for this. And this is what they need to do basically. Yeah. It takes a lot of time. Wow. I mean, we were prepping for this. You were telling me about your personal experiences with actually, I think it was the school, not only the school, but also the whole municipality about how you showed them that the data was flowed.

That was [00:07:00] so fascinating for me. Yeah. I could tell a little bit about that because it started with me getting tired of writing chronicles in the newspapers and I started building a network with different professionals and we're all writing chronicles about sort of the symptoms and the problems and kind of like the whole society is doing at this point in time, right?

But as an IT person, I kind of, I can do something different. That's what I thought. So, went to the shop and bought myself a 4G router, subscribed to an extra [00:07:30] sim card, put it in, and then I have an isolated router, with its own network basically. And what I then could do was visiting parents around in different municipalities.

And that's what I've been doing. I've sort of been traveling here and there, in and around Oslo, to different municipalities, probably 5-6 different ones, testing iPads and PCs. Don't think I've tested Chromebooks yet. I will, probably, very soon. And then I could have, let's take an example in Drammen. Took a first grade iPad.[00:08:00]

Basically connected to my router and then I only have that iPad connected to the router. So basically everything I see of traffic in that router is the iPad and nothing else, basically. And then I connect the router to a system I use personally, AdGuard, which has a great DNS service. What that means is that all the traffic that goes through AdGuard and my router is then analyzed by AdGuard.

They don't see any other content on the web, it's basically [00:08:30] like a phone book. So if I want to go to BBC, I type in bbc.co.uk and that will link it to an IP address. So that is basically everything it does. Everything on the web needs that phonebook. So that means also everything that has to do with advertisements or privacy addresses is also in the phonebook, basically.

And AdGuard is really good at categorizing all this type of traffic. So what I get from plugging in my phone [00:09:00] or an iPad or any device that's connected to the web, I can actually count the number of phonebook lookups or data exchanges that goes to the advertising networks or to the actual server where I'm interested in getting the content.

So I guess the statistics were divided in groups, which is great. So what I see from taking this first grade iPad connected to the router to AdGuard, then I spend like an hour on the iPad [00:09:30] surfing some Norwegian news media, um, surfing some school apps. Then we go into some gaming sites that we know that kids always figure out.

If they don't want to do schoolwork, they always go to these, spillespille. no is one of them that we call in Norway. There are tons of them. And we go to different Google searches and YouTube and we browse a bit like a kid. So we talk to the parents about how the kids use the iPad and so on. And then after an hour, we go in to AdGuard and look at [00:10:00] this, at the statistics.

And what we see is basically on an iPad. We see that 20 to 24 percent of the traffic is linked to advertisement networks. So that means like, almost 1 fourth, at least 1 fifth of all the traffic on the iPad within that hour is advertisements networks traffic, which is crazy, to be honest. And what I tell them... You mean the advertising sent to the iPad or [00:10:30] information about the person on the iPad sent to advertising.

Well, this is the iPad who is sending traffic to the advertisement networks that can happen in two ways. One way is that you actively go into let's let's say you take a newspaper that has advertisements, right? Then you, we all see visible advertisements on that newspaper. It can be, when you're scrolling down, it can be on the sides, it can be everywhere, right?

That is sort of the visible parts of the advertisement networks. That [00:11:00] is about 10 percent of the total advertisements traffic. The rest is about user behavior. Oh. The rest is about, where do you stop? How long do you stop? When do you start to scroll on? What do you click on? What do you see, basically? What do you do on the websites?

Or in the apps? That is 90 percent of that traffic. And these kids have not given a consent. To collect this data and when you think about it, well, you could always think, well, the kids are not logged in. [00:11:30] So how do they know who it is? Well, they know who it is based on IP addresses. That's sort of the easiest way.

They can also know it's if you, if you go to a site that's called miunique, I think it's miunique. org or com. Then you can see if your own device, how unique is your own Mac or PC on the internet, actually. And you will figure out that your device is actually very unique on the internet. It sort of has its own fingerprint based on all the things it sends to the websites you [00:12:00] visit.

So basically you're almost logged in without being logged in, right? So it's, it's not very hard to collect this data and aggregate it on your machine. And then over time, we understand that this is the same person, basically moving between three IP addresses. It could be a home, it could be a school, maybe some, some other place.

And then you can build a very strong profile on people without being logged in, basically. So this is the [00:12:30] real worry. I'm thinking like what I'm telling the municipalities is that I have a button in AdGuard. I can actually just click block and then I go down to 0 percent ad traffic on this device. And then my question is like, this is so easy to block and why don't you block it right?

So when I tell them, they block it. And that's interesting. So basically what it boils down to is like, this is lack of competence. This is lack of knowledge. [00:13:00] They don't know about the advertisement networks. They don't know enough about privacy, in general, and they don't know enough about the possible technical solutions to this, because it's possible.

So some municipalities are considering acquiring software, like Adguards, or setting up their own, because you could run your own software. It could be on a municipality level, it could be on a national level, if you want. But you can also buy it from, from a lot of different [00:13:30] providers. And the other way you could do it, especially with the younger kids, is introducing like an approval filter, or what we used to call a whitelist filter.

And that will basically take away all third party traffic. So that is, we have now two municipalities who's testing the whitelist filter. And that means you basically just go through a list where you approve all the sites and the apps, Background servers that should be possible to access from [00:14:00] especially the youngest kids.

Now there's clear recommendation from the government to do this from first to seventh grade. And that will effectively just open the sites you're supposed to access. And all the advertisement networks won't be able to to be accessed from the apps. So that that is very effective. This has been a long and tedious work.

I've been been sharing my insights also to the to the government about this. There's been many rounds in the parliaments with different political parties and things. So [00:14:30] we see a change, but still it's a very theoretic way of discussing it on one end. And I'm looking at my, well, this is very easy. So please just get started.

I mean, just press that button or whitelist. That's the two options, right? So yeah. Wow. That's, that's where we are. It's always nice to talk to like a tech expert on these things as well, right? Like I, I didn't know that about AgGuard and pushing the button and making it stop. You would [00:15:00] think that it would be done, I mean, I don't know, I'm speechless right now.

But there was another thing you told me that I want to talk about because I quoted it actually in the episode that's airing tomorrow for the first time. When your school switched to iPads, you were mentioning your experience in digital transformation. That's the way, that's not a best practice.

That you don't change from one moment to the next. I've been [00:15:30] also been writing about this in the press as a chronicle as well where I have this tabloid title called throw the iPads out of the classroom or something in that sense. If we read further down, a person worked with development. I'm also teaching other colleagues all the time about how to do development.

I know algorithmic thinking and all these terms that they try to bring into school. To be honest, I'm more worried about all the other subjects, like all the other things that we need in society. Like we need people in healthcare [00:16:00] and to build, construct buildings and everything. But now we basically just threw out all the basic knowledge and the basic learning in Norwegian school.

And we went into the big promise that everything is going to be solved by AI. Personal learning on the iPad and on the screen, basically. So we went like super fast into throwing out all the practical stuff, throwing out basic mathematics and things and sort of hoping that the mathematics apps will help the kid.

I don't have to go further than my own [00:16:30] kids to see that already from third grade they're starting learning less. We as parents had to step up very fast to help them evolve in the subjects in a way that we would expect. And I can see that, well, I never spent so many hours sitting with my kids at home just teaching them the basics that they don't learn in school anymore.

Like basic, how do you think, how do you write, how do you calculate in between the task and the answer, all these basic stuff. How do you [00:17:00] use a pencil with it? They, they just stopped learning all of this in school very, very rapid. I believe this had great consequence now for many kids in Norway. We sort of have a lost generation when it comes to the way it was introduced.

I sometimes talk about this as the most catastrophic failure I've ever seen when it comes to digitalizing something in the society. And I've been working probably with 20 different digitalization projects in private and public sector. [00:17:30] And this way of digitalizing is something that really breaks with every modern way of digitalizing, where we basically put the user's needs first, right?

And who's the user? It's a, it's a student, right? And also the students, together with the teacher and the parents. So, but the student was never involved in this digitalization. This was a top down approach. This was something that the politicians wanted. Because they said, uh, well, We'll basically be proud of ourselves [00:18:00] because we digitalized Norwegian school.

And they did it just by acquiring devices. And then they were done. And that's terrible, right? That's no way to digitalize. You have to do inside work. You have to understand the needs. You have to understand if it benefits more than what they have from before. You need to understand the friction points and where is value and you have to use it right.

And there was little or no guidance for the teachers on how to use this. They were basically taking away a lot of resources, like books, [00:18:30] and they were just given this one resource instead. So they were given less, in my opinion, than what they had, basically. Well, I think that's incredible how what the teachers must have had to do to achieve in such a short amount of time and And what's interesting is you were talking, and I think this is a general problem with like online safety, digitalization, is that we don't ask actually kids.

As a society, we're used to doing things for kids, but in the digital society, we [00:19:00] can't do that anymore. They have to be much more like empowered and involved. And the way you describe it makes that so clear because you wouldn't do that in an office because you want the company to keep running. And so it should be the same kind of process, right?

It's ask the user, which is the kids, we have to ask them, we cannot decide for them what they need. And that's such an important message and something to think about. And there's another aspect, which is very frustrating, because maybe we haven't thought about [00:19:30] this enough earlier, because we took it for granted, like parents could always look at the papers and the books the kids had at home, right? Kind of get updated, browse around and see what this year is about, what you're supposed to learn, how things are going. But what we also see by digitalizing schoolwork and schoolbooks into the iPads and the PCs is that parents lose access to that information.

There is no way for parents to log into these systems. Well, there could be, because [00:20:00] on the technical side everything is possible, right? But the people who roll it out and decide on the setup and how to do this, really haven't given parent access to the schoolwork. That also goes for the youngest kids, so you basically have to force your kid to tell him or her the password.

And then you have to trick your kid to get the password and log in, and you have to figure out where the schoolwork is, right? If your kid has a bad day, you can just forget to be able [00:20:30] to look at the schoolwork. This is actually pushing some laws in Norway, and I guess in in most countries, like, parents should be involved and are encouraged to be involved in schoolwork and in the kids lives.

It's been taken away a bit with the digital solutions, which is lacking features on this basically to, to properly work with school home collaboration, which is some, it's, it's very highly regarded in Norway. They talk a lot, a lot about this home school collaboration. [00:21:00] And one of the consequences of digitalizing and not being able to answer about privacy and content filtering and all these basic criterias.

yeah, has made the, that collaboration between home and school to collapse. Actually, in Norway. The trust has actually collapsed. We had a high trust before. And I would say it's not the parent's fault or the teacher's fault. This has happened as a systemic error that has really created a huge problem for both the teachers and the [00:21:30] parents and the kids.

So this needs to be corrected. I mean, we need to rebalance that so that it can, you know, work really well again because that's one of the biggest success criterias for school. I would say. Well, I would say too, I hope you continue to move slowly, unfortunately, in Norway, hopefully it will speed up your, hopefully it will speed up your success.

But I think it's so valuable for other countries, right? Cause Norway is advanced. You told me about Norway wanting [00:22:00] to be like the digital avant garde with the public, and I've been looking at, I have found additional proof of this. So a lot of different. The parents in different countries can really learn from things that you've experienced.

We have  a minister digital, a ministry of digitalization in Norway and they just gave me a huge report. As I say, we have a goal in Norway to be the most digitalized country in, by 2030, actually. If we're not already, so, uh, yeah, we'll see how it [00:22:30] goes. We need to do it properly. We need to take care of the kids.

Yeah. Yeah. We need to learn from you the rest of the world. Is it either laugh or cry, right? It's both. It's really both.

Just to close, unfortunately, but what advice would you give to the average non tech parent? How can they help find out for themselves what, where their kid's data is going, for example, or what steps would you propose? For me personally, it's been, [00:23:00] it's been really great to use a tool like AdGuard, which I mentioned.

I mean, if you want to look up that one, it's AdGuard DNS. I think you could start with a free plan. And I don't think I pay much. I'll put it into this show notes, actually. Also the other one you mentioned as well. Yeah, you also have NextDNS and you have, you have, uh, ControlD. You have a lot of different things out there to DNS services that can help you.

But it can be a bit fiddly to sort of get the first device connected. But once you've done it with one device, it's very easy to do the next [00:23:30] one. And there are good guidance and things. So I would promote that and give it a try. What you get is very interesting statistics of your own use as well. So I hooked all my family's devices, even the Apple TV is connected to AdGuard.

So I can see all this. I can see all the stats. So I basically see how many data connections our family is, is using every week or every month. I can't see what everyone is doing, but I kind of see what kind of websites or domains that we use, right? [00:24:00] And there is also good parent restrictions you can put on, you can put on SafeSearch on Google.

You have these upsides as well. But the main thing is that you learn about how much data and where your data is going on an everyday basis, which is like super great knowledge. And this will probably give you the same idea as I could probably test my kids iPads at school or the PC and you can start to sort of be that person locally as well.

So this is helping bringing real [00:24:30] knowledge to the table, both for yourself and your community. So yeah, that's what it is. That's so important. I really can't thank you enough because now I've learned it and I didn't know it before and I'm going to try it. Yeah. Because one thing is the knowledge. I just know that the data is, is out. But another thing is seeing it and you know, seeing that I'm looking forward to trying that myself. So thank you so much. And we're looking forward to watching you from a distance. [00:25:00] Bye. Bye. We encourage all parents and loved ones to ensure that the digital footprints their children create at school are treated with the respect and care they deserve.

If your school or area hasn't yet leaned heavily into technology at school, please do so now. We hope these stories will help you ask the right questions when they do. If you have a story to share, would like more info on these issues, or would like to contribute in any way, please [00:25:30] contact us. Together we can make a difference in safeguarding our children's digital futures.

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