Introduction
The development of the Internet and emerging technologies in the digital age has a great impact on people’s lives. In addition to making people’s lives more convenient, there are also some negative effects, such as a certain threat to people’s privacy. Specifically explained, the concept of privacy is derived from the privilege, that individuals should not be observed or disturbed by others, whereas the ability to achieve privacy often requires privileges to make choices that make this freedom from being disturbed possible (Marwick & Boyd, 2018). And one of the effects of the development of communication technology, especially online communication technology, is that it weakens the ability of individuals to control their private information (Gligorijević, 2019). People in the digital age cannot completely control their information from being leaked, and sometimes they even actively use their privacy to exchange information, such as leaving their private information in exchange for preferential treatment and discounts. Internet technologies have complicated people’s privacy concerns to the point that most people are constantly switching and negotiating between revealing and hiding their information. This relates not only to modern communication mechanisms but also to the evolving social and cultural uses of communication technologies. The way of information sharing in the digital age also extends to family life and children. As a marginalized group, children will be the focus group of this blog. Montgomery, Chester, and Milosevic (2017) found in their study of Children’s Privacy in the Big Data Era that as children increasingly use a wide variety of digital devices, the media and, advertising industries are creating new ways to track their behavior, yet research on children’s privacy still lags behind global changes in media, advertising, and technology. Therefore, this blog will analyze the threats to children’s privacy in the digital age, by using the example of children’s smartwatches. The increasingly popular children’s smartwatches are mostly labeled as “smart”, with “safety” and “convenience” as the selling point of the products, so parents buy children’s watches to protect their children. By contrast, this blog believes that instead of protecting children, these products may make them more vulnerable to privacy violations.
Child Privacy and Intimacy
In everyday life, parents generally believe that they have the right to monitor their children for safety reasons. Because of this, children’s smartwatches are selling well, giving parents more control, knowing where their children are and connecting them at any time. And for children who have just arrived at school and haven’t fully adjusted to school and class life, having a tool to contact their parents at any time can reduce their anxiety and increase their trust in the environment. At the same time, child abduction still occurs from time to time, and smartwatches can also reduce the risk of children being lost to a certain extent. Parents can check the child’s location in real-time on their mobile phone, set a safe distance range, and automatically alarm when the child leaves this range, all of which help to protect the child in emergencies. However, online surveillance is different from surveillance in the traditional sense and will cause additional privacy leakage issues, which are rarely noticed by users. Marwick and Boyd (2018) convincingly argue that an individual’s relationship to privacy can vary greatly relying on their environment and the social dynamics involved. That is to say, people have different views on privacy in different states and situations, which will also cause people to ignore privacy issues in some cases. When parents monitor their children, their consideration of other threats diminishes. In other words, when they master their children’s every move through smartwatches, they will feel that their children’s safety is guaranteed, so they ignore the problem of online privacy leakage, but if the children’s information is leaked, it will cause greater harm. In addition, geolocation technology is closely related to intimacy, and this kind of careful surveillance is the result of a continuous trade-off between disclosure and privacy (Marwick & Boyd, 2018), and there are many privacy security risks in the process.
Although from the perspective of technological development and social needs, children’s smartwatches conform to the expectations of parents for children’s safety and education. But technical experts have found that it is easy to tamper with the number of children’s watches through technical means, so that any dialed number can be displayed as “Dad” on the children’s watch. What is even more frightening is the ability to directly view the child’s geographic location through security technology loopholes, and monitor the child’s geographic coordinates, daily activity trajectories, and environmental recordings in real-time. Many children’s watch products on the market have a large number of security loopholes, which are easily attacked and exploited by criminals. Through these loopholes, criminals can remotely control the watch, eavesdrop on children’s conversations, turn on the watch’s camera to take photos and videos, and even send fake GPS location information to the parent, modify the emergency call to disable the SOS button. Such technical loopholes put children in an infinitely dangerous situation. If used by people with ulterior motives, this undefended phone watch will become a tool for child abduction, kidnapping, and other criminal acts. Stealing the privacy of children and their parents, fully exposing the information within the family, induces all kinds of conflicts and even crimes. From this perspective, this new technology product not only fails to protect children’s safety but also harms children’s safety and even parental safety and family interests.
What is more, the digital age is characterized by the ubiquity of surveillance devices such as hidden cameras, and individual autonomy over privacy is more threatened than ever. Becker (2019) concluded in his research on privacy that the loss of privacy does not necessarily mean the loss of autonomy, but that the independence of individual decision-making is often compromised in a digital age where privacy is threatened. In other words, when people are under covert surveillance for a long time, their sense of privacy and autonomy will become weak. Similarly, parents’ monitoring of children with smartwatches is essentially the exposure of children’s privacy. If things go on like this, children’s perceptions of privacy will change. If children are not given privacy their home life or in their daily lives, they will not know how to properly establish the boundaries of their privacy, or acknowledge the boundaries and privacy of others as they become adults (“Surveillance Technologies and Children – Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada”, 2022). Also, The Guardian has published an article stating that society’s reliance on and acceptance of surveillance tools can affect children’s perceptions of privacy. For example, when children face unknown data collection, they are less aware of protecting their privacy due to long-term surveillance, and thus are more likely to leak their information, leading to more serious security problems. Therefore, this blog argues that intimacy-based online surveillance of children in the digital age will create additional safety concerns, weaken children’s perceptions of privacy, and compromise their independence of private autonomy.
Protection of the law
In the digital age, many websites collect children’s data without parents’ knowledge or consent, which raises concerns about children’s privacy. In response to the rapidly growing problem of privacy breaches targeting children and online marketing techniques in the 1990s, the United States introduced COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act), which is a law enacted to protect the privacy rights of children under the age of 13.
(Picture from COPPA, 2000)
Besides, Germany’s telecom regulator, the Federal Network Agency (Bundesnetzagentur), already promulgated a prohibition on smartwatches for children in 2017, announcing that children’s smartwatches will be characterized as illegal listening devices and banned nationwide. Since most children’s smartwatches have the function of remote recording and monitoring in a silent state, parents can use the remote App to monitor the sound of the child’s environment through the watch without being noticed. These devices are identified as Unauthorized acquisition devices, which have constituted an illegal communication system. The agency’s investigation shows that some parents use children’s watches to monitor teachers’ lectures and conversations in classrooms. In Germany, it is illegal to monitor and record private conversations without permission. Therefore, Germany has completely banned the sale of all children’s smartwatches, which is not only a breach of children’s privacy but a breach of the privacy of uninformed people in the wider environment.
Status of the children’s smartwatch problem in China
In China, children’s smartwatches are becoming more and more popular among parents and children. However, in terms of watch safety standards, China is still lacking in legislation and supervision. The control of product safety and the protection of private information are all relying on the product manufacturer’s corporate ethics and technical level, there is a lack of third-party supervision and certification. In 2022, CCTV’s 3.15 Consumer Rights TV Show exposed the chaos of low-end children’s smartwatches illegally obtaining user information. It is reported that the manufacturer used a lower version of the operating system to reduce the cost, which is likely to allow malicious software to enter the watch, resulting in the opening of various sensitive permissions without the user’s authorization to obtain information such as children’s locations, camera images, and recordings. Children with unclear privacy boundaries due to surveillance rarely notice apps collecting their personal information in the background without permission. Fraud text messages and fraudulent phone calls may appear because of privacy leaks, which disturbs children’s daily life and may cause property damage to their families. In addition, for children, if their dynamic real-time information is grasped by certain criminal groups through smartwatches, they may even face serious safety problems. China’s children’s smartwatch market is showing a trend of rapid development, and intelligence and convenience have become the life trend of today’s children.
However, while smart devices bring convenience to children, they are also accompanied by the risk of privacy leakage. Moreover, the way children use technology is also worth noting, which affects their identity in the digital age. Technology is essentially a tool to help people do one thing better, rather than relying entirely on it. Children cannot control themselves, and when convenient technology is placed in front of them, they tend to be controlled by it. In other words, some children are overly dependent on technology. For example, when a child encounters small trouble, he immediately uses his smartwatch to search the Internet, or use the watch to call his parents to solve the problem. This is not the correct attitude towards technology, excessive dependence will cause children to lose their abilities and become completely dependent on digital platforms, which increases the degree of surveillance and the risk of leakage of private information. Therefore, this blog believes that children’s smartwatches are the product of the intersection of children’s products and communication equipment, which need a more complete authentication and supervision system. Otherwise, it will cause great harm to children’s privacy and privacy concepts, and at the same time affect the safety of the entire family and even the whole society. As the United nation (2021) mentioned Children’s right to privacy in the digital age must be improved, that parents have a role to play in protecting their children’s privacy rights, but it is not up to them alone, the state must guarantee children’s rights by enacting appropriate laws.
Conclusion
In conclusion, this blog analyzes the threats to children’s privacy in the digital age through the example of children’s smartwatches. Specifically, parental surveillance of children could weaken children’s perceptions of privacy and negatively affect their independence of private autonomy. Moreover, constant online monitoring such as smartwatches is likely to cause privacy leakage. If used by criminals, it will cause serious security problems, not only endangering children but also their families. Although some countries have regulated children’s smartwatches or introduced corresponding protection measures and legal provisions. But there are still no comprehensive protection measures for children’s privacy in China. Moreover, the popularity of children’s smartwatches in China has also caused children’s dependence on electronic products, which is not conducive to the protection of their privacy. In general, the digital age poses many threats to children’s privacy, which requires legal protection and citizens’ awareness of privacy protection.
Reference list:
Becker, M. (2019). Privacy in the digital age: comparing and contrasting individual versus social approaches towards privacy. Ethics And Information Technology, 21(4), 307-317. doi: 10.1007/s10676-019-09508-z
Gligorijević, J. (2019). Children’s Privacy: The Role of Parental Control and Consent. Human Rights Law Review, 19(2), 201-229. doi: 10.1093/hrlr/ngz004
Marwick, A. E., & Boyd, D. (2018). Understanding Privacy at the Margins: Introduction. International journal of communication [Online], 1157+. https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A561120196/AONE?u=usyd&sid=bookmark-AONE&xid=3df64beb
Montgomery, K., Chester, J., & Milosevic, T. (2017). Children’s Privacy in the Big Data Era: Research Opportunities. Pediatrics, 140(Supplement_2), S117-S121. doi: 10.1542/peds.2016-1758o
Surveillance Technologies and Children – Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. (2022). Retrieved 7 April 2022, from https://priv.gc.ca/en/opc-actions-and-decisions/research/explore-privacy-research/2012/opc_201210/