Here is the full transcript of Paul Davis’s talk titled “Accountability & Responsibility In A Digital World” at TEDxStMaryCSSchool conference.
In this TEDx talk, Paul Davis emphasizes the significance of understanding and managing digital trails and footprints. He explains how every online action, from smartphone usage to social media interaction, leaves a traceable digital footprint, impacting both privacy and security.
Davis also discusses the serious implications of cyberbullying, highlighting the legal responsibilities that young individuals face and the importance of not engaging in such activities. He advises students to take responsibility for their online behavior, underscoring how digital actions can affect their reputation and future opportunities. Davis concludes by urging the audience to be mindful and respectful in their use of technology, always considering the potential impact on their image and relationships.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
The Beginnings of a Tech Journey
When I was 12 years old, my mother purchased a computer for me, thinking that I was going to play games on it. When she gave it to me, she didn’t understand what I was going to do with it, and I started coding right away. It’s because of my mom and the gift that she gave me that allowed me to basically explore technology, programming, circuit boards. And it was from that point on, after programming and hanging out with like-minded individuals, that I got my first job when I was just under 20 years old with a tech firm.
And I thought, this is it. My career is going to be in tech. For the past 26 years professionally, I’ve dedicated my life to information technology. I’ve always said it’s fun, but it was four years ago at my daughter’s school where the principal talked to me about why kids get in trouble using technology that my life turned around.
A Turn Towards Education
And what I did was I spoke to the kids at my daughter’s school about being safe online. I also had a conversation with the principal about speaking to the parents, because I’ve always said to the kids, and for those at St. Mary who remember this, “I don’t blame any of you guys for getting in trouble online.” I always put the responsibility on parents who, you know, they put the technology in your hand and they’re supposed to guide you.
I mean, that’s our responsibility. I said, “So please, let me reach out to these parents along with the kids,” and he did. One thing led to another, and you just heard the stats in terms of how many kids I’ve spoken to, over 25,000 parents, over 1,200 principals, twice at the Ontario Provincial Police, twice at the Department of National Defense. What I found out four and a half years ago as I started speaking is that this is the most rewarding time of my life, education, and giving knowledge back.
Inspiration and Responsibility
What my mother gave me, I’m now able to give to you. And I’ve always, always followed in the footsteps of a mom who at the time was a single mom because my parents had split up, and she gave me all the values to move forward in life. And every day that I do something, I always think about, “Am I going to make my mom proud?” Because she gave me the opportunity to where I am today.
So, having said that, at a young age, you have a ton of accountability and responsibility. The responsibility is yours. The accountability is to your parents. I speak to principals all the time where I hear stories of kids coming into the office who have participated in cyberbullying and have said, “That was a mistake. I didn’t mean to do that. It was an accident.”
Addressing Cyberbullying
And I look at the principals and I say, “Those are pathetic excuses because there’s no such thing as accidental cyberbullying or it was a mistake.” I can give you a very simple example of how cyberbullying occurs. Number one, you have to type in or take a picture to do the hurt, to initiate the pain. “That’s an accident?” So, if I make an inappropriate comment, I type that out.
Then I have to actually transmit it, meaning I post it or I send it from one device to another device so the person sees it. Two accident items don’t equal a mistake or an accident; they equal intent, meaning it was intentional. I met a father who said to me, “I don’t know what my son was thinking when he made that comment,” and I looked at him and said, “I know what he was thinking. He was thinking about hurting someone because he had to think about it before he typed it and then transmit it.” So, I want to put excuses aside and I want everyone to step up.
You are empowered with technology. That’s how privileged you are because you live in the greatest country in the world where your parents have worked so hard to empower you with that technology. Be respectful because they own it. You know, before I came over here today, I stopped off at a mobility store and I walked in and I said, “My daughter wants to buy a phone.”
I want to give it to her. And I asked the lady, “How old does she need to be?” She says 18. I said, “No, I want her to come in. I want her to pick it.” She says she has to be 18. So students, if I ask you how many of you own your phones, the majority will put up your hands. The reality is you don’t.
Understanding Ownership and Responsibility
Your parents own those devices. You see, what happened was when you purchased the phone, was that your parents made the financial transaction. Number two, they signed the contract with the telephone company because you can’t because you’re not an adult.
Number three, they pay the monthly bill.
Now, you may have earned your money to pay for the phone, which I think is responsible, and you might actually give them the money every month to pay for the bill, but it’s their name that is on the contract and makes the financial transactions all the time. If a principal confiscates a phone, hands it over to a police officer, and that police officer investigates it, your name doesn’t come up. Your parents’ name comes up. So, I always tell kids, “You love, care, and respect your parents.”
Think about how you use these technologies when you go online because every time you go online, you leave digital trails of all your actions. Now, some people say digital trails, digital footprints are the same thing. I actually break them down into two. Let’s talk about digital trails.
Digital Trails and Footprints
Let me give you some examples. Sending a text message, the sending device, the receiving device, the servers in between. If I send a text message that is hateful, threatening, bullying, or racist, I can delete the message off my device not to get in trouble, but the person who received it now has a copy on their device. If they report it to law enforcement and they investigate it, they can contact my phone company, their phone company, and get information as to when I sent the message and when that message was received.
When you go online and you send an email, emails leave so many digital trails, it’s unimaginable how many servers they hit before they actually hit the recipient’s device. Let’s say, I want to use your teachers as an example, let’s say your teachers come to school and they give you a test and then they sit behind their computer and they decide they’re going to email 25 friends and family about a big party they’re having on the weekend.
Well, that’s a mistake because the school board will know when they sent the email, at what time, from what computer, to whom, what was the context of that email and if that computer was in class where the teacher is supposed to be teaching and they sent it from that computer, the school board will know. What about if your principals come to school and they decide to surf the web and they decide “I need to do some shopping?”
I’m a principal, I can’t leave, but I need to go online and do some shopping. So they spend an hour at walmart.ca to do some shopping, after an hour they come out of the office with a big smile on their face because they’re getting the order shipped to their home and they’ll think, “Well, no one will know,” well they’re mistaken because the school board will know when they went online, how long they were online, and when they left. These are trails of their actions. Every time you post something on Blackberry Messenger, Kik, Facebook, Twitter, every example up there leaves a trail.
You know that Ask website where you thought it was anonymous? Well, for those in the same area, I busted that myth. I showed them exactly where Ask.fm servers reside and now how law enforcement have access to your IP addresses, the context of what was sent, received, and posted. I know you guys use this thing called Yik something, Yok, YikYak, I’m making fun.
You know what? Most people think, “Well, no one will know, that’s completely anonymous.” Look at the legal section within YikYak, you know what you will find? You will find how they will relinquish information to law enforcement with a simple subpoena. None of these trails disappear, and they lead to your digital footprints.
Let me give you examples of digital footprints. What you write to your hard drive is now physically written. What you write to a memory card, a flash drive, your smartphone, if you’re a console gamer, a lot of them have hard drives, it will write information to the hard drive.
Cloud storage, people think the cloud, it’s virtual, it’s out there. The cloud is a physical hard drive, except it gives you easy access to what you posted up on the web. But it’s physically written somewhere on a hard drive, so go back to point number one, it’s written there. And of course, your footprint is stamped every time you visit a social networking site.
Understanding Digital Trails and Footprints
“Why? Because it’s posted.” So now let’s talk about digital trails and footprints. You transmit something from your smartphone to Facebook. You left a trail and you’ve left a footprint. You transmit something from your computer to cloud storage. You’ve got the stamp, the footprint on your computer. You’ve got the trail to the cloud storage. You’ve got another footprint on cloud storage.
Handheld device to Instagram. You post a simple comment. You like the picture. You’ve left a trail of what is permanently online in a digital footprint. And we can go through example after example after example. But I’m here to tell you, you leave both trails and footprints every time you go online.
Now, when your teachers and I were growing up, we had a saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” But that was all up to interpretation. So if we put the same picture in front of 10 people, their thousand words would all be different. Now, a picture is a book, a digital book. So what you look at visually, when I look at it as a programmer, as a coder, I look at it digitally, meaning time, day, location, aperture setting, lighting settings, all kinds of information is written to a picture.
Decoding Digital Information
So that picture is of me, believe it or not, and I’m in Banff, but I’m at a hill called Sunshine. And the only way you will know by looking at that picture that I’m at Sunshine is by looking at the map behind me. If you look closely enough, because I analyzed the picture, you can see in the reflection of my visor, the chairlift that’s off to the side and the chairlift has a name. And if you grew with that name, you would see Sunshine.
But what happens if you couldn’t see the chairlift or you couldn’t see the map? Well, analyzing the picture using binary code, because binary code is what makes up pictures, you would analyze the time, day, location of where the picture was taken, which is precise. Because I remember sending that picture over to my wife and they were able to decode it. So these trails are real.
The Complexity of Digital Images
You know how sophisticated pictures are? You know the bad people on this earth that want to bring harm to all different countries and won’t use their word and give them acknowledgement? They send messages within images, within JPEGs. Because an image is made up of zeros and ones, binary code, they actually embed messages in certain components of the pictures.
And when a picture is received, that person that is intended to receive the picture is now decoding it and they’re looking at what the message is. And law enforcement have to go through pictures. So think about that from the national security level angle and then think about it when they’re investigating a picture that was transmitted from one device to another in case it was an inappropriate picture. I let Google track me.
A Personal Experiment with Digital Trails
I’ll give you one more example about digital trails. I was in Calgary for two weeks and one day I decided I’m going to let Google track me. So here’s what I did. I had Google follow me from the moment I woke up in my hotel to every school I went to. I went to two schools that day. So I left my hotel, I went to school A. After school A, I went to Starbucks. After Starbucks, I went to school B.
After school B, before I went and spoke to the parents of both schools together, I went back to the hotel, I took a nap. After that, I had a light bite. I went back to the school. And then after that, I was invited to a function which was on the west end of Calgary. After that, I went back to the hotel. It tracked everywhere I was going precisely. So to just finalize it, the trails don’t lie.
So listen, when it comes to cyberbullying, students have always said, “It’s not a matter of if you’re going to get caught, it’s a matter of how and when you will get caught.” But today I’m not going to lecture you on cyberbullying because you love, care and respect each other and that’s obviously the best reason why you wouldn’t hurt another person. If you happen to go home this weekend and bully another person online, digitally from your home, on your computer, in your bedroom, the next day when your principals are investigating what happened, they actually have to address the bully because two students are involved.
Now principals have three options. Number one, give the bully a warning. Number two, suspend the bully from school. Number three, call in the police. If your principal has to call in the police, well, a suspension can still be issued. But now the police don’t care about that. You see, they care about criminal law. And they want to see if what you did violated criminal law. And you all know, everyone in this room, you’re not a kid anymore. You’re now a young offender.
And so these charges can be laid against you. The day after you turn 12 years old, it’s called “12 years plus a day,” you’re criminally chargeable by law. But like I said earlier, you don’t have to worry about that because you love, care and respect each other. I just need you to know that in the back of your head.
Responding to Cyberbullying
So what happens if you get cyberbullied? I’ve always told kids every day, “Don’t ever respond to a bully.” I know it’s an emotional piece. Move away from it. What I need you to do is I need you to print out every picture, post, comment, chat session, screenshot. Put all that evidence together and bring it to an adult, someone you trust. Show them what has hurt you. Let the adult in your life, whether it be a teacher, a principal, a guidance counselor, your parents, a police officer, show it to them, let them deal with it.
We the adults, that’s our ethical and moral duty in life is to help guide and protect you. Bring it to us, say “I need help” and let us deal with it. Let the bullies get caught. Let them get dealt with. They’ve left trails behind. But I need you to speak out.
The Importance of Reputation and Education
And finally, when you leave school, you’re going to leave with two things guaranteed to you students, an education and a reputation. You spent every year of your life earning an education. You’ve also built up a reputation, social media. What happens when you go looking for a job? You’re going to submit a resume. A resume is going to have your first name, last name, your address, your email address, your phone number, where you went to school, what jobs you had.
When an employer looks that up, they have the ability to look you up online and now judge you based on your online activity. Those negative digital trails can supersede your education so you can be the best qualified for the job. But if the trails say you post inappropriate pictures, you disrespect people, you do something that just goes against what they like as a candidate. They take both documents, they put them together, they rip them up.
A Call to Responsibility
You know that’s a violation of your human rights, right? You know what the problem is? No one’s ever going to know what happened. Why? Because it’s happening online. So please, when you go online, I want you to do something. I want you to think of your parents, whether they’re here or not, and always think, “Am I going to make them proud?” If you have that voice in the back of your head, when you use the technology that they gave you, you will always, always make the right decisions.