What Tech Companies know about our Children
I am pleased to announce that my TedxMileHigh talk is now online. In the talk I explain that tech companies are tracking children, starting before they’re born, often before they’re conceived, and throughout their lives — on Google and Facebook, through pregnancy tracking apps, in the classroom, and the doctor’s office. I show how the […]
TEDx MileHigh!
Crazy news! TEDxMileHigh invited me to give a TEDx talk in front of 5,000 people on November 16th at the Bellco Theatre in Denver. I can’t believe it! I am honored and thrilled. The theme of the event is “Imagine.” TEDxMileHigh, and I will be talking about data rights. I will be joining other fantastic […]
Datafied Families
When I asked Mike (the father of two children under 13 years of age, who lived in Los Angeles) if he could imagine the data flows that came out of his family life, he laughed looked up and said, ‘massive amounts; unimaginable amounts’ and then he added “if one thinks about the data we produce […]
Voice Prints and Children’s Rights
As voice-operated AIs become part of everyday living, children talk to them, they ask questions, they make jokes, they test their intelligence, or they demand to hear a specific tune. These technologies answer, interact with them and collect enormous amounts of personal and highly contextual data. Yet we have very little knowledge or understanding about […]
Social Media Data
Yesterday I wrote a post that argued that we need to move beyond a focus on what parents ‘share or not share on social media’ and instead consider children’s social media data flows. But how can we really understand social media data? The truth is that we can’t. Social media data is extraordinarily complex, as it includes not […]
Against Sharenting
On the 3rd of January 2019, the mother blogger Christie Tate, wrote an opinion piece for the Washington Post, where she describes her fourth-grade daughter’s reaction to finding out about her blog. When her daughter saw all the ‘baby’ pictures and intimate details shared with the world, she became very angry and upset and asked her mother to take the essays […]
Coerced Digital Participation
One afternoon in March 2017, I interviewed Alexandra. Alexandra had migrated to England, from Eastern Europe 12 years ago, and lived in a small council flat in South East London with her two children, aged 8 and 10, and her husband. In her interview she told me how difficult it was for her to adapt […]
The Child Data Citizen Book with MIT Press
On the 15th of January, I signed the book contract with MIT Press, and I am really looking forward to submit the Child | Data | Citizen book on the 1st of August 2019. The Child | Data | Citizen book will explore the datafication of children. Children, today, are the very first generation of citizens to be […]
Data Injustice and Ethnographic Sampling?
There is something profoundly unequal and unjust about the different ways in which dataveillance and digital profiling impacts white, middle-class families on the one hand, and ethnic minority, migrant or low-income families on the other. Data technologies and automated systems are not equal or fair. This emerges beautifully in Eubanks’ book (2018), Automating Inequality. It […]
Datafied Children: The Research
In November 2018, the UK Children’s Commissioner published a report warning that children are being datafied from birth. In the last few days we have seen a plurality of press articles talking about datafied children. But what does it really mean to talk about the datafication of children? What can we learn from the research on the topic? […]
