Algerian Youth and Online Privacy: Digital Literacy, Data Exposure, and the Generation That Grew Up Online

A Generation Online Without a Guidebook

Algeria’s demographic profile shapes its digital risk landscape. With a median age of approximately 29 and nearly half the population under 30, Algeria has one of the youngest populations in the Mediterranean basin. This demographic is also the most digitally active: the country had 54.8 million mobile connections at the start of 2025 — more lines than people — with 91.4% of those connections broadband-capable. Social media identities among Algerians aged 18 and above reached 25.6 million, equivalent to 83.5% of the adult population. Platforms like TikTok (21.1 million Algerian users aged 18+), Facebook (25.6 million users), Instagram (12.0 million users), and Snapchat are the primary channels for social interaction, entertainment, news consumption, and increasingly, commerce.

Yet this generation entered the digital world without formal preparation. Digital literacy — the ability to critically evaluate online information, understand privacy settings, recognize manipulation, and manage one’s digital footprint — is not a substantive component of Algeria’s national education curriculum. The Ministry of National Education has introduced basic ICT (Information and Communication Technology) courses in middle and secondary schools, but these focus on computer operation (word processing, spreadsheets, basic internet use) rather than digital citizenship, data privacy, or online safety. Research on Algerian higher education confirms that students still experience significant weaknesses in digital dexterity, even in the context of expanding online education. The assumption appears to be that digital natives intuitively understand digital risks. They do not.

The result is a generation that is technically proficient at using apps but functionally illiterate about the consequences of their digital behavior. Algerian teenagers routinely share phone numbers in public Instagram bios, post geotagged photos from their schools and homes, use the same password across all platforms, and accept friend requests from unknown accounts without hesitation. Each of these behaviors creates exploitable data points that advertisers, scammers, and predators collect systematically.

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Data Exposure: What Algerian Youth Share and Who Collects It

The data exposure problem among Algerian youth operates at two levels: voluntary sharing and invisible collection. Voluntary sharing is visible — TikTok profiles listing city, school, and age; Instagram stories tagging precise locations; Facebook profiles displaying phone numbers, relationship status, and family connections. With internet penetration at 76.9% across Algeria’s 47.4 million population, the volume of personal data voluntarily shared by young users is enormous and growing.

Invisible collection is the deeper problem. The apps that Algerian youth use most heavily — TikTok (owned by ByteDance), Instagram and Facebook (Meta), Snapchat, and various free gaming apps — collect extensive behavioral data: browsing patterns, location history, contact lists, device identifiers, keystroke patterns, and in some cases, clipboard contents. TikTok’s data collection practices have been scrutinized globally, with the Irish Data Protection Commission fining TikTok EUR 345 million (approximately $367 million) in September 2023 for GDPR violations related to children’s data processing, including making teenage accounts public by default. Meta agreed to a record $5 billion FTC settlement in 2019 over deceiving users about their ability to control the privacy of their personal information, following the Cambridge Analytica scandal that affected 87 million users.

Algerian users have no equivalent regulatory protection. While Law 18-07 (2018) classifies minors’ data as requiring parental or legal guardian consent for processing, enforcement is effectively nonexistent. No Algerian regulatory action has been taken against any social media platform for data collection practices targeting Algerian users of any age. Algeria has taken steps to modernize its framework — Law 11-25, adopted by Parliament in July 2025, introduced requirements for Data Protection Officers and Data Protection Impact Assessments, while expanding the ANPDP’s oversight powers. However, no youth-specific data protection guidance has been issued. International platforms process Algerian users’ data under their global privacy policies, which are written to comply with EU (GDPR) and US (COPPA) regulations — but enforcement of those protections for Algerian users is, at best, incidental.

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The Human Risks: Cyberbullying, Sextortion, and Radicalization

Beyond data privacy, Algerian youth face specific online safety threats that intersect with cultural and social context. Cyberbullying is widespread but underreported. While Algeria does not have standalone cyberbullying legislation, the Algerian Penal Code includes provisions addressing cyberbullying and defamation through internet use, and the December 2024 Law on Audiovisual Activity prohibits online content promoting violence, discrimination, or false information. Despite these legal instruments, enforcement remains limited and victims — particularly girls — face social stigma that discourages reporting. UNICEF Algeria works on child protection including training police on cybercrime and computer investigations, but institutional response mechanisms remain underdeveloped. In May 2024, Algeria adopted the African Union’s Child Online Safety and Empowerment Policy, a framework for protecting children online while promoting digital literacy, though implementation is still in early stages.

Sextortion — the use of intimate images or conversations to blackmail victims — is a particularly acute risk for Algerian youth. Cultural norms around honor and reputation make sextortion devastating in ways that extend beyond the individual to family and community consequences. Algerian security services have prosecuted sextortion cases, and Interpol’s Operation Contender 3.0 (2025) arrested over 250 suspects across 14 African nations for sextortion and romance scams, underscoring the transnational nature of these threats. The volume of cases reaching formal channels in Algeria likely represents a fraction of actual incidents. Young men and women are targeted through fake social media profiles that build trust before soliciting compromising content, which is then used for financial extortion or further manipulation.

Online radicalization, while not unique to Algeria, leverages the same digital literacy gaps. Young users who cannot distinguish between legitimate information and propaganda, who do not understand how algorithmic recommendation systems create echo chambers, and who lack critical media evaluation skills are more vulnerable to extremist content. Algeria’s experience with terrorism during the 1990s provides institutional awareness of radicalization risks, but the online dimension requires different detection and prevention approaches than physical surveillance. Digital citizenship education that teaches critical evaluation of online content serves both privacy protection and counter-radicalization objectives.

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Building Digital Citizens: Education, Regulation, and Parental Engagement

The most impactful intervention is integrating digital citizenship education into Algeria’s school curriculum from middle school onward. This is not computer science — it is practical literacy. Students should learn to: audit their own social media privacy settings, understand what data apps collect about them, recognize phishing and social engineering attempts, manage passwords securely (using password managers), evaluate the credibility of online information sources, and understand the permanent nature of digital content. Estonia made digital literacy mandatory across all grade levels in 2014 through its ProgeTiger program, which has since expanded to include AI-focused modules. Finland integrates media and digital literacy as a transversal competence across its entire national curriculum, recognized internationally as a leading model.

Algeria’s Ministry of National Education can adapt existing international frameworks rather than building from scratch. UNESCO’s Media and Information Literacy Curriculum provides a comprehensive competency framework available in nine languages, designed specifically for integration into formal teacher education systems. The EU’s DigComp 2.2 framework maps 21 digital competencies across five areas — including safety and critical information evaluation — with over 250 practical examples. The DQ (Digital Intelligence) Institute’s IEEE 3527.1 Standard, the world’s first global standard for digital literacy approved in 2020, provides a structured taxonomy that aggregates over 25 prior frameworks. Teacher training is the bottleneck — educators who are themselves digital immigrants need professional development to teach these skills credibly. Partnership with Algerian universities’ computer science and communication departments, and with civil society organizations already active in digital awareness, can accelerate this.

For parents, the challenge is generational. Many Algerian parents are less digitally fluent than their children and struggle to understand, let alone manage, their children’s online activities. Parental control tools (built into iOS and Android) offer technical measures, but the more effective approach is informed conversation. Public awareness campaigns — through television, social media, and mosque community programs — should equip parents with specific knowledge: what apps their children use, what data those apps collect, what privacy settings exist, and what warning signs indicate that a child may be experiencing online harassment or exploitation. Recent government initiatives are encouraging: in September 2025, the Ministry of Youth and the Ministry of Postal and Wire Transport signed a framework agreement linking youth empowerment with digital transformation, while Algeria Telecom partnered with the Setif Youth Directorate to offer free training in AI, cybersecurity, and cloud computing. Algeria’s National Cybersecurity Strategy for 2025-2029, established by presidential decree in December 2025, provides a policy framework that should explicitly incorporate youth digital safety as a priority, not an afterthought.

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Sources & Further Reading

• DataReportal Digital 2025: Algeria — Social media and mobile statistics
• Irish DPC — EUR 345 million fine of TikTok for children’s data violations (2023)
• FTC — $5 billion Facebook privacy settlement (2019)
• DPA Digital Digest: Algeria 2025 Edition — Law 11-25 and cybersecurity strategy
• CMS Expert Guide — Algeria Data Protection and Cybersecurity Laws
• UNICEF Algeria — Child Protection Programme
• UNESCO Media and Information Literacy Curriculum
• EU DigComp 2.2 Digital Competence Framework
• DQ Institute — IEEE 3527.1 Digital Intelligence Standard
• Estonia Digital Literacy — ProgeTiger and media literacy policy
• Finland Media Literacy Education — National curriculum model
• Algeria Telecom and Setif Youth Directorate Digital Skills Partnership
• Interpol — Operation Contender 3.0: Pan-African cybercrime arrests (2025)
• Worldometer — Algeria Demographics 2026