Percentage of 15-Year-Olds Who Can Easily Change Settings of a Device (App) To Protect Their Data and Privacy, by Socio-Economic Status, 2022

Data from the OECD's 'How's Life for Children in the Digital Age?' report, published in 2025, shows that 51% of 15-year-olds can easily manage digital privacy settings, and that this ability is closely linked to socio-economic status (SES). High-SES teenagers consistently report higher technical agency than their low-SES peers, and this divide is evident across all analysed European countries. Ireland demonstrates the highest overall proficiency (64.5%), while Slovakia reports the lowest for low-SES students (33.8%). The socioeconomic gap is particularly acute in Hungary and Greece, where high-SES teenagers outperform their low-SES peers by almost 20 percentage points. This highlights significant inequalities in children's ability to mitigate digital privacy risks based on their socioeconomic status across Europe.