Children’s digital playgrounds as data assemblages: Problematics of privacy, personalization, and promotional culture

Abstract

Children's digital playgrounds have evolved from commercialized digital spaces such as websites and games to include an array of convergent digital media consisting of social media platforms, mobile apps, and the internet of toys. In these digital spaces, children's data is shared with companies for analytics, personalization, and advertising. This article describes children's digital playgrounds as a data assemblage involving commercial surveillance of children, ages 3-12. The privacy sweep is used as a method to follow the personal information traces that can be expected to be disclosed through typical use of two children's digital playgrounds: the YouTube Kids app and Fisher-Price Smart Toy plush animal and companion app. To trace the data flows, privacy policies and other publicly available documents were analyzed using political economy and privacy informed indicators. This article concludes by reflecting upon the dataveillance and commercialization practices that trouble the privacy rights of the child and parent when data assemblages in children's digital playgrounds are surveillant.

A Unified Framework of Five Principles for AI in Society

“…On both YouTube and YouTube Kids, machine learning algorithms are used to both recommend and mediate the appropriateness of content. 868 YouTube representatives, however, have been opaque about differences in the input data and reward functions underlying YouTube Kids and YouTube. 869 Lack of transparency about the input data used in algorithms makes it difficult for concerned parties to understand the distinction.…”

Youth and Social Media: From Vulnerability to Empowerment & Equality (Guest Editors' Introduction)

“…Our contributors specifically provide a range of examples of the digitally mediated lives of young people from approximately age four (junior kindergarten) to age 30 (graduate students). Through these contributions, we seek to build on children's rights-oriented scholarship for a digital age (e.g., Livingston & Bulger, 2014;Livingstone & O'Neill, 2014;Livingstone & Third, 2017;Lupton & Williamson, 2017) as well as the previous literature where themes of empowerment and vulnerability in youths' digitally mediated lives are addressed (e.g., Livingstone, 2008;Regan & Steeves, 2010;Smith et al, 2017;Smith & Shade, 2018), as well as youth and research ethics (Kiidenberg, 2020).…”

A dialogic analysis of Hello Barbie’s conversations with children

“…Using dialogic analysis to 'read' Hello Barbie's utterances Hello Barbie provides a unique opportunity to examine how marketers hope to do this, because Mattel has published a complete catalogue of the algorithm's dialogic output. 1 Much of the literature that has engaged with networked toys like Hello Barbie has focused on the privacy implications of this type of algorithmic processing (Montgomery et al, 2017;Smith and Shade, 2018;Steeves, 2006). However, I suggest that dialogic analysis of the company's output provides an additional way of interrogating the commercial practices at the heart of big data, by opening a window into the ways in which the marketing context (and the marketer's goals and expectations within that context) shape the 'doing' of marketing as a big data practice.…”

“…In this paper, I analyse Hello Barbie as a commercial artefact to begin to unpack how the use of big data analytics is reshaping both the enterprise of marketing (Montgomery et al, 2017) and the dialogic opportunities offered to the children who are inserted into the socio-technical system upon which that marketing depends (see Lupton and Williamson, 2017;Smith and Shade, 2018). I begin by situating Hello Barbie in the CRM literature and tracing the doll's development as a CRM tool.…”

“…Marketing to children is accordingly big business, and it is a business that is increasingly being shaped by the contemporaneous collection, analysis and operationalization of the data generated by the devices that children use as they go about their daily lives. Those data are typically fed into customer relationship management (CRM) systems that are designed to come to 'know' the child, by translating discrete pieces of information about them into actionable information that can then be used to engage the child in an ongoing dialogue in an attempt to shape their consumption (Smith and Shade, 2018).…”