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RebeccaBonnevieFirstEssay 4 - 01 Apr 2018 - Main.RebeccaBonnevie
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[Incomplete] How do parents protect the privacy environment of a digital native?
-- By RebeccaBonnevie - rewrite 31 March 2018
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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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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[1] Alpaydin, Ethem, Machine Learning, The New AI, MIT Press, October 2016
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