Last but very far from least in our Privacy Week series was a fascinating presentation by Annette Mills and Rebecca Hawkins, the co-convenors of the Foundation’s children’s privacy working group.
Annette and Rebecca highlighted that biometric technologies can have significant benefits for children including personalised learning, enhanced accessibility, more nuanced healthcare and some ability to provide additional safeguards for children. However, they are also resulting in more and more information about children being captured, stored and potentially re-used (or, worse, misused). Perhaps a useful way for adults to think about this is to imagine what our own current digital profiles would look like if these technologies had been available when we were children…
This might have a serious impact on children’s autonomy in the future and raises risks about lack of transparency, unintended consequences for children and – perhaps most alarming – the way the technologies modify children’s brains, affecting their behaviour, social development and expectations.
Annette and Rebecca go on to discuss specific examples of smart toys and ed tech, and raise the need to think about ethics as well as privacy when applying these technologies to children.
At the Foundation, we’d love to hear more about people’s experiences – both good and bad – with these technologies.
To view the whole presentation, go to the Privacy Commissioner’s YouTube channel: From Playtime to Profiling: How Biometric Tech is Shaping Children’s Digital Lives