Privacy and use of responses

Last updated: October 2026

This diagnostic is designed to help a parent and young person compare how they experience technology in their family. It is also being used to learn whether there are broader patterns in how parents and young people perceive family technology culture.

What we collect

We collect the answers given by the parent and young person, a broad age band for the young person, optional written comments, completion times, and short feedback about whether the diagnostic was useful.

We deliberately do not ask the young person for their name, email address, exact date of birth, school, social-media username or home address.

How family responses are linked

Responses are linked to a household using a randomly generated family code. If more than one child takes part, each child has a separate private link and a separate parent-child comparison. Children are labelled Child A, Child B and so on; their names are not collected.

A child’s answers are compared only with the parent answers given specifically for that child. Siblings’ individual responses are not shown to one another by the diagnostic.

How responses may be used

If consent is given, de-identified responses may be combined with responses from other families and analysed to identify broader patterns. Aggregated findings may be used in reports, articles, presentations, educational material, media commentary or other publications about family technology culture.

Published results will be presented in aggregated or otherwise de-identified form. We will not publish a family code, child name, email address, school, exact date of birth or other direct identifier.

Written comments

Optional written comments are collected to help improve the diagnostic and understand the kinds of experiences families describe. They will not be published as identifiable quotations. Any future use of a quotation would require additional care to remove identifying detail and, where appropriate, separate permission.

Participation is voluntary

Taking part is voluntary. A parent may choose not to allow their family’s responses to be included in aggregated published findings. A young person is also asked separately whether they are comfortable participating and whether their de-identified answers may be included in aggregated published findings.

If publication consent is not given by both the parent and young person, that family’s responses should not be included in published aggregate analyses.

This is not a clinical assessment

The diagnostic is a reflection and conversation tool. It is not a psychological, medical, clinical, legal or child-safety assessment and should not be relied on as one.

Data minimisation

Only information reasonably useful for operating, evaluating and improving the diagnostic is collected. Young people should not enter names, usernames, school details, addresses or other identifying information in free-text fields.

Security

Responses are stored in a password-protected database associated with this website. Reasonable technical and administrative steps are used to restrict access. No internet-based system can be guaranteed to be completely secure.

Questions, access or deletion requests

If you want to ask a privacy question or request deletion of a completed family response, contact the operator of this site and provide the family code if you still have it.

Important: before public launch, replace this paragraph with a real privacy contact email address.

Changes to this notice

If the way responses are collected or used changes materially, this notice should be updated and the consent version changed before new responses are collected.