Alexa do you Care?
J: My son wakes up and says “Alexa what time is it?” And she replies. He has conversations with her. So he goes and tell her very silly things like ‘you are such a goof’ or ‘”you are stupid” or “you are dumb” and things like that, and she replies “Well you are not so […]
The Data in our Faces
Over a month ago I was travelling through London Heathrow airport with my daughters. As soon as we reached security, an officer looked at our passports, asked P (4 years old) to look up and not to smile for the camera. After she dutifully obeyed, he took a small, black device and scanned the face […]
Don’t share Photos of my Child
On the 23rd of May I was interviewed by The Guardian for a feature piece on the practice of ‘sharenting’. I think the article does an excellent job in analysisng the risk associated with posting information of children online. Yet I question whether sharenting is really a useful term when we look at the impact of social media in family […]
A Parent’s Mobile Addiction?
I pick up the phone so many times in a day, and I look for things constantly” said Roger[1], the father of a five-year-old who I interviewed for the Child | Data | Citizen project. He paused, looked up and added “don’t ask me what I am looking for, because I don’t know”. When we […]
Child | Data | Citizen @UCLA
On the 3rd of May I delivered a Keynote at the fifth annual Research & Inquiry Conference at UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies. The talk drew on the findings of the Child | Data | Citizen Project, and explored the multiple variety of data traces that are produced daily about children and […]
No Opting Out?
Everyday when parents join new services, download new apps, connect with others on social media or buy the latest home devices, they often sign off the terms and conditions that decide how their children’s data is used without reading them. What I am finding out when I talk to parents is that the reason why […]
Maternity Gap
If you wonder why there is such a gap in news posts, well the answer is simple: I was on maternity leave between July 2017 and June 2018 (and if you are a U.S. reader, yes, you read this correctly. Under European law this is common!) . During my maternity leave, I kept on gathering important […]
BabyVeillance on Pregnancy Apps
When we think about the ways in which children’s data is collected and used we need to start from the very beginning and look at the rapid growth in use of pregnancy apps. Today, a great majority of parents download one or more of these apps on their phones and other technologies to monitor, track […]
Photos for you life: Google Photos
Last year, Google announced on its Research Blog the release of the ‘Show and Tell’ free software, which is now free to download on Tensorflow. The software, is able to read the content of images and describe them by adding full sentences in English. For people working with large images data sets this can be […]
Is Your Face Big Data?
As ordinary citizens, we know very little about the accuracy of facial recognition softwares. We of course may know that facial recognition is used by the police and security forces to identify criminals. We also may know that a couple of years ago Facebook launched its DeepFace facial recognition technology, which is able to identify individuals […]