Datafied child welfare services: unpacking politics, economics and power

Abstract

This article analyses three distinct child welfare data systems in England. We focus on child welfare as a contested area in public services where data systems are being used to inform decisionmaking and transforming governance. We advance the use of "data assemblage" as an analytical framework to detail how key political and economic factors influence the development of these data systems. We provide an empirically grounded demonstration of why child welfare data systems must not be considered neutral decision aid tools. We identify how systems of thought, ownership structures, policy agendas, organizational practices, and legal frameworks influence these data systems. We find similarities in the move toward greater sharing of sensitive data, but differences in attitudes toward public-private partnerships, rights and uses of prediction. There is a worrying lack of information available about the impacts of these systems on those who are subject to themparticularly in relation to predictive data systems. We argue for policy debates to go beyond technical fixes and privacy concerns to engage with fundamental questions about the power dynamics and rights issues linked to the expansion of data sharing in this sector as well as whether predictive data systems should be used at all.

Balancing Privacy: Sharenting, Intimate Surveillance and the Right to Be Forgotten

“…Without precedents to draw from, moral panics in the media about screen time and online predators may potentially drown out the seemingly more banal but equally important information about helping young people manage their online presence and privacy (Green et al, 2019). Increasingly, everything from child welfare services to interactive toys harness, generate, store and potentially share personal data about children (Holloway & Green, 2016;Redden et al, 2020), without necessarily providing any transparency around the use, storage or ownership of that data. While privacy itself can be conceptualised quite differently (Quinn et al, 2019), it is clear that from sharenting on social media to the data gathered by a host of apps across the fields of health, entertainment and education that privacy is seen as a barrier, not a right, to the operation and profitability of apps, platforms and the companies that own them.…”

Kapitalismus, Big Data und die neue Rolle der Archive: Anmerkungen zu kritischer Medienkompetenz in Zeiten digitaler Transformation

“…Mau 2018;Kitchin 2017;Eubanks 2018;Mejias und Couldry 2019). Wieder andere kritisieren Fehler und Ungerechtigkeiten in prädiktiver Polizeiarbeit (Kaufmann et al 2019), digitaler Politikausformung und Meinungsbildung (Treré 2016), automatisierter Kinderfürsorge (Redden et al 2020) oder eines digitalisierten Schulwesens (Williamson 2017;Golden 2017;Williamson und Hogan 2020). Auch negative Effekte der Digitalisierung für Arbeitsbedingungen und die Umwelt wurden bereits mehrfach ausgeleuchtet (Qiu 2016;Maxwell und Miller 2012;Notley 2019;Global E-Waste Monitor 2017;China Labor Watch 2018).…”

Towards geographies of child protection

“…The exact use of such systems in England remains somewhat unclear to date. Redden, Dencik, and Warne (2020) found that 53 local authorities were making use of some form of predictive analytics in various aspects of their services. They argue austerity has created the need for councils to seek out new ways of operating and encouraged the turn to ‘datafied’ services.…”