Playing for Privacy Awareness: Learning from a "Wow-Moment" with iBuddy

The paper presents iBuddy, a two-hour narrative simulation in which a fictional "synthetic buddy" app surprises students with their own extracted personal data, including contacts, photos, and app usage. The central thesis is that this "wow-moment" generates enough emotional impact to anchor privacy-awareness discussions in secondary and higher education, with a structured debriefing using open-source software and CC-licensed materials. The approach is designed with privacy safeguards in mind: data is processed on a local network and deleted at session end, typically within about 30 minutes.

The study's evidence base spans 52 sessions with 978 students across 17 schools, conducted between March 2021 and March 2022. Post-session surveys rated data privacy as highly important (mean 8.96 out of 10), the activity as useful (mean 8.58), and enjoyment at 7.82, with involvement rising among older students. A two-month follow-up with 124 secondary students (a 22% response rate) found that the largest self-reported change was in general privacy awareness, with smaller gains in specific behaviors such as reading terms of use and managing cookies. Only 16% of respondents scored high on the composite behavioral indicator, suggesting that durable behavior change is more limited than awareness gains.

The scope of the work centers on school-based settings in a single national context, with the time period limited to the 2021–2022 implementation window. The intervention draws on simulation-based learning theory and digital skills frameworks, situating privacy education within broader debates about platform capitalism and the growth of Android app permissions over time.