In this post, I think out loud about what improving online safety for children in The Green Paper on Children’s Internet Safety means ahead of the General Data Protection Regulation in 2018. Children should be able to use online services without being used and abused by them. If this regulation and other UK Government policy and strategy are to be meaningful for children, I think we need to completely rethink the State approach to what data privacy means in the Internet of Things.
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Children in the Internet of Things

In 1979 Star Trek: The Motion Picture created a striking image of A.I. as Commander Decker merged with V’Ger and the artificial copy of Lieutenant Ilia, blending human and computer intelligence and creating an integrated, synthesised form of life.

Ten years later, Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote his proposal and created the world wide web, designing the way for people to share and access knowledge with each other through networks of computers.

In the 90s my parents described using the Internet as spending time ‘on the computer’, and going online meant from a fixed phone point.

Today our wireless computers in our homes, pockets and school bags, have built-in added functionality to enable us to do other things with them at the same time; make toast, play a game, and make a phone call, and we live in the Internet of Things.

Although we talk about it as if it were an environment of inanimate appliances,  it would be more accurate to think of the interconnected web of information that these things capture, create and share about our interactions 24/7, as vibrant snapshots of our lives, labelled with retrievable tags, and stored within the Internet.

Data about every moment of how and when we use an appliance, is captured at a rapid rate, or measured by smart meters, and shared within a network of computers. Computers that not only capture data but create, analyse and exchange new data about the people using them and how they interact with the appliance.

In this environment, children’s lives in the Internet of Things no longer involve a conscious choice to go online. Using the Internet is no longer about going online, but being online. The web knows us. In using the web, we become part of the web.

Our children, to the computers that gather their data, have simply become extensions of the things they use about which data is gathered and sold by the companies who make and sell the things. Things whose makers can even choose who uses them or not and how. In the Internet of things,  children have become things of the Internet.

A child’s use of a smart hairbrush will become part of the company’s knowledge base how the hairbrush works. A child’s voice is captured and becomes part of the database for the development training of the doll or robot they play with.

Our biometrics, measurements of the unique physical parts of our identities, provides a further example of the recent offline-self physically incorporated into banking services. Over 1 million UK children’s biometrics are estimated to be used in school canteens and library services through, often compulsory, fingerprinting.

Our interactions create a blended identity of online and offline attributes.

The web has created synthesised versions of our selves.

I say synthesised not synthetic, because our online self is blended with our real self and ‘synthetic’ gives the impression of being less real. If you take my own children’s everyday life as an example,  there is no ‘real’ life that is without a digital self.  The two are inseparable. And we might have multiple versions.

Our synthesised self is not only about our interactions with appliances and what we do, but who we know and how we think based on how we take decisions.

Data is created and captured not only about how we live, but where we live. These online data can be further linked with data about our behaviours offline generated from trillions of sensors and physical network interactions with our portable devices. Our synthesised self is tracked from real life geolocations. In cities surrounded by sensors under pavements, in buildings, cameras, mapping and tracking everywhere we go, our behaviours are converted into data, and stored inside an overarching network of cloud computers so that our online lives take on life of their own.

Data about us, whether uniquely identifiable on its own or not, is created and collected actively and passively. Online site visits record IP Address and use linked platform log-ins that can even extract friends lists without consent or affirmative action from them.

Using a tool like Privacy Badger from EEF gives you some insight into how many sites create new data about online behaviour once that synthesised self logs in, then tracks your synthesised self across the Internet. How you move from page to page, with what referring and exit pages and URLs, what adverts you click on or ignore,  platform types, number of clicks, cookies, invisible on page gifs and web beacons. Data that computers see, interpret and act on better than us.

Those synthesised identities are tracked online,  just as we move about a shopping mall offline.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee said this week, there is a need to put “a fair level of data control back in the hands of people.” It is not a need but vital to our future flourishing, very survival even. Data control is not about protecting a list of information or facts about ourselves and our identity for its own sake, it is about choosing who can exert influence and control over our life, our choices, and future of democracy.

And while today that who may be companies, it is increasingly A.I. itself that has a degree of control over our lives, as decisions are machine made.

Understanding how the Internet uses people

We get the service, the web gets our identity and our behaviours. And in what is in effect a hidden slave trade, they get access to use our synthesised selves in secret, and forever.

This grasp of what the Internet is, what the web is, is key to getting a rounded view of children’s online safety. Namely, we need to get away from the sole focus of online safeguarding as about children’s use of the web, and also look at how the web uses children.

Online services use children to:

• mine, and exchange, repackage, and trade profile data, offline behavioural data (location, likes), and invisible Internet-use behavioural data (cookies, website analytics)
• extend marketing influence in human decision-making earlier in life, even before children carry payment cards of their own,
• enjoy the insights of parent-child relationships connected by an email account, sometimes a credit card, used as age verification or in online payments.

What are the risks?

Exploitation of identity and behavioural tracking not only puts our synthesised child at risk from exploitation, it puts our real life child’s future adult identity and data integrity at risk. If we cannot know who holds the keys to our digital identity, how can we trust that systems and services will be fair to us, not discriminate or defraud. Or not make errors that we cannot understand in order to correct?

Leaks, loss and hacks abound and manufacturers are slow to respond. Software that monitors children can also be used in coercive control. Organisations whose data are insecure, can be held to ransom. Children’s products should do what we expect them to and nothing more, there should be “no surprises” how data are used.

Companies tailor and target their marketing activity to those identity profiles. Our data is sold on in secret without consent to data brokers we never see, who in turn sell us on to others who monitor, track and target our synthesised selves every time we show up at their sites, in a never-ending cycle.

And from exploiting the knowledge of our synthesised self, decisions are made by companies, that target their audience, select which search results or adverts to show us, or hide, on which network sites, how often, to actively nudge our behaviours quite invisibly.

Nudge misuse is one of the greatest threats to our autonomy and with it democratic control of the society we live in. Who decides on the “choice architecture” that may shape another’s decisions and actions, and on what ethical basis?  once asked these authors who now seem to want to be the decision makers.

Thinking about Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s comments today on things that threaten the web, including how to address the loss of control over our personal data, we must frame it not a user-led loss of control, but autonomy taken by others; by developers, by product sellers, by the biggest ‘nudge controllers’ the Internet giants themselves.

Loss of identity is near impossible to reclaim. Our synthesised selves are sold into unending data slavery and we seem powerless to stop it. Our autonomy and with it our self worth, seem diminished.

How can we protect children better online?

Safeguarding must include ending data slavery of our synthesised self. I think of five things needed by policy shapers to tackle it.

1. Understanding what ‘online’ and the Internet mean and how the web works – i.e. what data does a visit to a web page collect about the user and what happens to that data?
2. Threat models and risk must go beyond the usual irl protection issues. Those  posed by undermining citizens’ autonomy, loss of public trust, of control over our identity, misuse of nudge, and how some are intrinsic to the current web business model, site users or government policy are unseen are underestimated.
3. On user regulation (age verification / filtering) we must confront the idea that as a stand-alone step  it will not create a better online experience for the user, when it will not prevent the misuse of our synthesised selves and may increase risks – regulation of misuse must shift the point of responsibility
4. Meaningful data privacy training must be mandatory for anyone in contact with children and its role in children’s safeguarding
5. Siloed thinking must go. Forward thinking must join the dots across Departments into cohesive inclusive digital strategy and that doesn’t just mean ‘let’s join all of the data, all of the time’
6. Respect our synthesised selves. Data slavery includes government misuse and must end if we respect children’s rights.

In the words of James T. Kirk, “the human adventure is just beginning.”

When our synthesised self is an inseparable blend of offline and online identity, every child is a synthesised child. And they are people. It is vital that government realises their obligation to protect rights to privacy, provision and participation under the Convention of the Rights of the Child and address our children’s real online life.

Governments, policy makers, and commercial companies must not use children’s offline safety as an excuse in a binary trade off to infringe on those digital rights or ignore risk and harm to the synthesised self in law, policy, and practice.

If future society is to thrive we must do all that is technologically possible to safeguard the best of what makes us human in this blend; our free will.

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Part 2 follows with thoughts specific to the upcoming regulations, Digital Economy Bill andDigital Strategy

References:

[1] Internet of things WEF film, starting from 19:30

“What do an umbrella, a shark, a houseplant, the brake pads in a mining truck and a smoke detector all have in common?  They can all be connected online, and in this example, in this WEF film, they are.

“By 2024 more than 50% of home Internet traffic will be used by appliances and devices, rather than just for communication and entertainment…The IoT raises huge questions on privacy and security, that have to be addressed by government, corporations and consumers.”

[2] The government has today announced a “major new drive on internet safety”  [The Register, Martin, A. 27.02.2017]

[3] GDPR page 38 footnote (1) indicates the definition of Information Society Services as laid out in the Directive (EU) 2015/1535 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 9 September 2015 laying down a procedure for the provision of information in the field of technical regulations and of rules on Information Society services (OJ L 241, 17.9.2015, p. 1 and Annex 1)

image source: Startrek.com