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< | Should A Child Have The Right To A Blank Slate?
-- By RebeccaBonnevie - 06 Nov 2017 | >
> | [Incomplete] How do parents protect the privacy environment of a digital native?
-- By RebeccaBonnevie - rewrite 31 March 2018 | | | | |
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< | In 2013 the Huffington Post ran an article saying that photos of a newborn baby appeared online within 60 minutes of their birth. While the data may not stand up to a rigorous statistical analysis, the idea behind it remains true – parents control when and how their children are uploaded and often start sharing them on day one of their lives.[1] | >
> | A baby born to gadget-loving parents today can generate more data in her first month than it took for Homer to narrate the complete adventures of Odysseus. [1] | | | | |
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< | The motivations behind sharing one’s children with friends and strangers are not novel – pride, joy and solidarity – but the reach of a parental share today is a lot larger than yesteryear. Whereas sharing used to be showing a supermarket cashier a string of wallet photos, today many parents are very comfortable opening their child’s life up – images, personal identifiers, experiences and details – to all the parent’s connections on social media platforms.[2] | >
> | A child’s family ought to be intentional protectors of her privacy. Unfortunately, due to convenience and ambivalence digital natives are being born into (or quickly furnished with) online identities. This, coupled with the data on the behavior of the immediate family members allow companies to map that child's social environment and predict her milestones well before she has any understanding of herself. If society places value on the privacy of a child, then this plight of digital natives need to be addressed. | | | | |
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< | Protection of children online is currently focused on protection against online predators. This is obviously very important, but I feel like society is missing a more uncomfortable piece of the puzzle: a child’s right to a blank slate. | >
> | Lawrence Lessig in “Law of the Horse” suggests there are four modalities of regulation in real and cyberspace: law, social norms, markets and architecture. Markets benefit from behavior collection so regulation is unlikely to come from that modality. This leaves law, social norms and architecture to address the protection of the privacy environment. | | | | |
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< | What is a blank slate? | >
> | Adapting Law: covering the greater privacy environment
The UNICEF 10-Point proposal on the e-rights of children includes number 6: “The right to withhold personal data on the Internet and to preserve their identity and their image from possible unlawful use.” A California “online eraser” statute enacted in 2015 goes some way towards this. A platform provider must comply with a request from a person under the age of 18 to delete their posts. This law has some major limitations – it doesn't cover all online platforms, the information might be hidden from the public but may be kept on a server, and the platform is not required to remove something posted by a third party about the person including where a third party reposted the person's post. | | | | |
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< | I see two parts to a blank slate. First, concealing the majority of personal identifiers. The first thing a parent usually posts is the child’s full name, birth date, location (possibly inferred) and other miscellaneous details (birth weight, caesarian-section etc). Thus, within the first day of life social media platforms learn a baby’s family links and personal identifiers. Second, hiding a child’s image. With facial recognition becoming more reliable year on year, images of a person will give online platforms all sorts of information about them: associates (family and friends), frequent locations, likes and dislikes, habits, commonly used brands etc. | >
> | Law tends to focus on privacy as an individual right that affects only the individual if it is relinquished by express consent. Cambridge Analytica has shown that to be falsity. The French attempted to create consequences for parents oversharing, but this is a reactive rather than preventative approach. The law is not an effective modality to protect children’s privacy environments. | | | | |
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> | Creating a social norm: Parents need to be educated
When I began this rewrite the challenge was how to convince parents that their actions to engage with the Machine and share information about themselves and their children affects the children's privacy and allows thtme to be targeted. However, the past few weeks of revelations about Cambridge Analytica seems to have got us half the way there. The masses have been shocked and revolted at the revelation that Cambridge Analytica could obtain data about person A via a decision person B had made about themselves: how dare CA obtain data to analyze and target me without my knowledge, consent or control! This should awaken them to the action needed to preserve a child’s privacy environment. | | | | |
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< | As Apple has recently been emphasizing, current facial recognition
software has much lower ability to distinguish between children's
faces. and infants are---as you know from experience---much more
alike than even pre-toddler children. Neural network-based facial
recognition is not going to be able to associate an infant's, or even
a child's image, with the face of a teenager or adult human being
anytime soon, probably ever. | >
> | In New Zealand most expectant couples attend ante-natal classes about birth and having a newborn. At these classes, and through the health support system of midwives, hospitals and doctors, couples are given all sorts of information. From the first few weeks to vaccinations, from co-sleeping to breastfeeding; information is given about all aspects of a child’s life. All aspects except their privacy. When I asked myself when a social norm to protect a child’s privacy environment could be adopted, I thought of this as a vehicle. A child’s privacy environment needs to be treated like any other aspect of the child’s health – teach it alongside how to swaddle your newborn, and provide reading materials that emphasize the importance of the baby’s privacy that can be passed over with a pamphlet on the different breastfeeding holds. | | | | |
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But no one has ever had a blank slate…
I agree to an extent; previously parents would make birth announcements in a local paper, and a child may find themselves inheriting a legacy or reputation from a parent/sibling. However, this information was either difficult to access or had limited geographic reach. Generally, today’s parents defined themselves online, rather than inherited an online presence.
A fairly recent European Court of Justice case held Google had to comply with a Spanish man’s “right to be forgotten”. There is no such right in the US, as it is seen to contradict the constitutional right to free speech, but I wonder whether a right to be forgotten will develop as the online-from-birth generation grow up. The first newborn to be put on a newly launched Facebook will now be 10/11 years old. We don’t yet know how they will react once they inherit the key to their digital castle, or how it will affect them in their studies, employment or personal lives. Perhaps society’s values will have changed so much the parental overshare will not be an issue. Alternatively, we may see a new type of teenage rebellion: suing their parents for breaching their right to privacy as children.
What protections are out there?
The UNICEF 10-Point proposal on the e-rights of children includes the right to privacy in electronic communications: “the right to withhold personal data on the Internet and to preserve their identity and their image from possible unlawful use.” However, for this to be an effective right it needs to be enforced against parents, family and friends or it will be undermined from day zero.
Under French privacy laws parents could face penalties as severe as a year in prison and a fine of ¤45,000 if convicted of publicizing intimate details of the private lives of others – including their children – without their consent. This is the closest to the right to a blank slate, though it comes with a set of logistical challenges: at what age can a child give consent; is enforcement based on complaints or will it proactively protect children; and what is the appetite for putting a parent in jail for oversharing about their child.
Can a blank slate even exist nowadays?
I have two children and though we didn’t go quite this far, my husband and I have chosen not to put many personal details nor their faces online. I have two main observations thus far. First, it is tricky socially. This is nothing that cannot be overcome, but it means reminding people at birthday parties and public gatherings of our position (and usually taking one then removing ourselves from the photos so they can get a shot they can post), and dealing with defensive comments and strange looks from other parents.
The second observation, is that we haven’t succeeded. We’ve never had anyone test it, but I know there are innocently posted photos from weddings, birthdays, and other events online, and if facial recognition software crawled the web I imagine my children would show up in photos strangers have taken of them (yes that happens), and in the background to many more. | >
> | Change the architecture: secure sharing.
Finally, the architecture must be made to provide parents means to share their cherub with family and friends without putting a child’s datapoints up for collection. I would expect it to begin with the privacy hygiene for the immediate family and expand to the mechanisms for sharing.
My local early childhood center engage software called Storypark which they pay for but I own. The guardians of the child own the content posted and can invite family members to view it. The guardians keep control of the account even when no longer associated with the early childhood center and the terms and conditions say they will not sell the personal data of the children to anyone. This by itself is a good step, though of course has a limitation if the email notification of new content is landing in a gmail account. It is, however, not public broadcasting so may not provide the affirmation that the Facebook generation needs to get the requisite dopamine high. | | | Conclusion | |
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< | While it can be seen as a futile exercise given the tsunami of information that intentionally or inadvertently ends up online, I still believe that children should have a right to as much of a blank slate as we can muster. While there are movements in some parts of the world towards this, I think it will take a global societal change for the default position to be to protect a child’s privacy. | >
> | Privacy is a combination of three things: secrecy, anonymity, and autonomy. One of the problems with it being addressed by law is that is often conceptualized as an individual right rather than a collective one. In fact, my actions affect those around me, a fact far too obvious in the Chinese system of social rating. Privacy should be approached in an environmental way, and the environment of the most vulnerable in our society should be protected by the rest of us.
Like anything that involves societal change, often the momentum for the movement takes some time. Hopefully the knowledge of Cambridge Analytica will cause parents to be open to counter ideas about the privacy environment. I think the reality will be, like in so many areas, one generation will do the damage, and the next generation will be left trying to clean up the mess and pull the train back onto the tracks. | | | ______________________________________________________________________________________ | |
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< | Some children appear online in an in-utero shot, but in not wishing to begin a discussion about where a woman’s rights stop and a child’s rights start, I am going to use day 0 as the start point of the child’s right to a blank slate.
I say “very comfortable” with sharing, but I believe more often than not a sharer-parent has not thought very hard about possible consequences of their actions.
The details here seem to me to be a little too detailed; a step back
might help the essay's perspective to improve. You are discussing
one of the primary modes of "privacy pollution," that is, the
environmental effect degrading the privacy not of the "subject" who
uses services to share or communicate information, but rather of the
subject's family, intimates, friends, and so on whose interests are
adversely affected by individual choices. As you say, one of the
most frequent outcomes is that people poison their children, as they
did when they smoked cigarettes. The fact that they were poisoning
their children helped them to stop smoking, in many cases.
Perhaps it would make less sense to ask, therefore, whether one's
children are occasionally appearing in other peoples' photos than
whether one's family calendar is on line, one's own email is being
data-mined, etc. If a child has a right to a clean data
environment, as you point out, that will be determined primarily by
the behavior of the surrounding adults. French law is very good at
creating meaningless regulations: obviously one will not improve the
environment around children by claiming readiness to impose absurd
fines on parents in the event of unimaginable litigation that will
be defeated by inter-familial immunities anyway. So what would
really improve the essay would be some new ideas about how to
encourage parents not to pollute their children's privacy
environment. It will take education, as the dangers of second-hand
smoke needed to be taught to parents in order to encourage them to
quit. Perhaps you can help show us all how.
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> | [1] Alpaydin, Ethem, Machine Learning, The New AI, MIT Press, October 2016 | | |
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