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What’s the harm in essentially ignoring that privacy policy? While the majority of the time it’s harmless, there are some ne’er-do-wells that may gather your personal information and sell it to marketers, advertisers, or spammers. While terrible, it’s not unheard of.

According to a recent report, there’s a big reason users don’t read privacy policies: they’re too damn long. Of the top 1,000 websites, the longest privacy policy takes about 45 minutes to read…the average takes 10 minutes. About 72% of these websites allow users to opt out of being tracked. However, about 40% make you make navigate to a different (sometimes hard-to-find) section of the website to opt out.

Google has tools like the Google Dashboard, the Ads Preferences Manager and encrypted search if you’re looking for some of the more popular ways to manage your Google interactions. Most recently, Google launched an extension for Chrome called Keep My Opt-Outs, which allows you to opt out permanently from ad tracking cookies. And pretty soon Chrome will be extending the availability of 2-step verification, an advanced account security solution that is now helping protect more than 1,000 new accounts a day from common problems like phishing and password compromise. Right now it’s available to Google Apps Accounts and should available to the general public in a few weeks.

The less we work with students on being critically literate online, and the more we avoid social media and networking as an authentic part of the classroom experience, the more danger our students will be in.

Let’s not wait until high school when they are perceived to be old enough. If we wait until then, we will have to do more untraining of bad habits students have picked up Facebooking etc.

From my experience, although I don’t think any age is too early, I have noticed that ages 8-10 are the perfect time to start.