A WEEKLY NEWSLETTER ON DATA PRIVACY
I'm Daniel. I'm a technology director and certified data protection officer based in Amman, Jordan. Most professional development on data privacy is a workshop you don't have time for. This is the version that fits in your inbox. Once a week, on what your tools are doing with your data.
THIS WEEK · MICRO PD 012 · JUNE 10
Nobody is going to call you
On giving a twelve-year-old a way to text, and what iMessage and WhatsApp each cost him.
My son is twelve, and we're giving him a way to text his friends. I do data protection for a living, so I assumed this would be the easy part. It hasn't been. Mostly it's shown me how much I'm deciding for him without him noticing. A phone number. An app. A backup setting he'll never think to check.
The surprise was which of those matters most. Not the app. The number. It's the most durable thing he'll own, wired to his bank and his logins before long, and miserable to unpick once it is. His mother is learning that now, weeks into a new one and still finding services pinned to the old.
Issue 012 is about a child's first messaging account, and the quiet truth underneath it: the most protective choice usually looks like doing less, and he'll never know it was there.