https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878X19828205
Media International Australia
2019, Vol. 170(1) 27­–36
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1329878X19828205
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Corresponding author:
Donell Holloway, Edith Cowan University, 2 Bradford St, Mount Lawley WA 6050, Australia.
Email: donell.holloway@ecu.edu.au
828205MIA0010.1177/1329878X19828205Media International AustraliaHolloway
research-article2019
Special Issue Article
Surveillance capitalism and
children’s data: the Internet
of toys and things for children
Donell Holloway
Edith Cowan University, Australia
Abstract
This article discusses the positioning of children both as objects of economic activity as and
subjects of market relations under surveillance capitalism. It looks briefly at the history of
children’s engagement with the market economy from their engagement in the labour force
during industrial revolution times; their disappearance from direct economic activity during the
Romantic Movement; through to their emergence as both data sources and data consumers
within a big data economy. It argues that this is the first time since children retreated from
the paid labour force in the late 19th and early 20th centuries due to labour law reforms that
their activities are of significant economic value, and that the emergence of Internet-connected
toys and things for children will significantly amplify children’s position as data sources under
surveillance capitalism.
Keywords
big data, children, datafication, dataveillance, datified child, Internet of toys, IoTT, surveillance
capitalism
Introduction
Surveillance capitalism refers to new economic conditions in which online information (data) is
converted into valuable commodities, and where the capture and production of these commodities
(data) rely on mass surveillance over the Internet. In comparison to post-Fordist production practices,
where the economy moved away from the office and factory, towards an economy progressively
reliant on a ‘knowledge economy’, surveillance capitalism takes into account newer ‘big
data’practices which rely on the monitisation of people’s online data. These data are often extracted
from the same population that will be eventually be its targets (Zuboff, 2014).
The Cambridge Analytica revelations, for example, have highlighted the extent to which Internet
companies surveil the activities of digital citizens and how this can substantially shift the balance of
power. Citizens’ data are captured, stored, monitored, analysed and on sold to commercial entities
including ‘other online platforms, data brokers, intelligence agencies, and public administrations’
28	 Media International Australia 170(1)
(Hintz et al., 2017: 732). Cambridge Analytic’s actions infringed upon Facebook’s own access regulations
by carrying out data scraping, analytics and targeted on-selling under the pretence of academic
research (Dwoskin and Romm, 2018). Their dealings also violated election interference
regulations in the United Kingdom and United States. Despite the illegality of Cambridge Analytics
actions, the bigger players and leading actors, Facebook and Google, are still legally amassing as
much information as they can about specific users, their online friends and their offline friends
(through shadow profiling) and making huge profits largely through facilitating micro-targeting by
advertisers (Harris, 2018; Zuckerman, 2018). In this sense, Cambridge Analytica ‘is the little kids
department when compared to what Facebook does’ (Kulcha, 2018: 22).
In the case of children, questions have long been raised about children’s data privacy in relation
to children’s websites and apps (Grimes, 2008; Montgomery, 2002; Steeves, 2006). The advent of
Internet-connected toys and children’s wearables, along with devices and apps not actually intended
for children such as smart home assistants, provides significantly amplified opportunities for the
appropriation of children’s data for commercial profit within a surveillance economy. Thus, concerns
have been raised about how the commercial appropriation of children’s online information in
the era of connected things further compromises the privacy and data security of children; often
from children who are too young to consent to or understand the implications of this practice
(Baraniuk, 2016; Harris, 2017; Holloway and Green, 2016). In addition to this, the consequences
of accumulated data over a child’s lifetime – which will quickly outstrip the data accumulated on
their parents – is of fundamental concern (Mascheroni and Holloway, 2018).
Using a Political Economy framework, this article investigates the positioning of children both
as objects of economic activity (as data sources) and subjects of market relations (as digital consumers)
under surveillance capitalism (Andrejevic, 2014; Zuboff, 2015). It traces the history of
children’s engagement with the market economy, through to their emergence as both data sources
and data consumers within a big data economy. The article highlights how the emergence of connected
things for children complicates and amplifies the significance of children’s data for commercial
entities within a surveillance economy. First, and despite having already been purchased
and owned by consumers, the presence of embedded and connected software in children’s toys and
wearables means that the customer is subject to long-term contractual obligations. These terms and
conditions enable data exchange between the child and the platform; the child and parent; and the
child and other data sharing recipients. Furthermore, the assortment of sensors embedded in
Internet of toys and things (IoTTs) for children provides new datasets that are already being captured
and datafied (Lupton and Williamson, 2017). These new data sources include children’s
voices, movements, locations, images, breathing and heartbeat patterns. Consequently, the connection
of children to the Internet through their bodies, play, learning and social interactions further
heightens children’s re-entry into the economy both as economic objects and subjects.
Surveillance capitalism in the lives of children
As a new version of capitalism, surveillance capitalism monetizes data obtained through surveillance
(Zuboff, 2015). The term surveillance capitalism was coined by academic Shoshana Zuboff.
She suggests that surveillance capitalism depends on ‘a global architecture of computer mediation
… which produces a distributed and mostly uncontested new expression of power that that I christen:
“Big Other”’(p. 75). The biggest ‘Big Other’actors at this stage are Google,Amazon, Facebook
and Apple who in combination collect and control unparalleled quantities of data about their users
activities which they turn ‘into products and services that have fuelled stunning commercial
growth’ (Moore, 2016: ii).
Holloway	 29
This corporate practice was first consolidated at Google. Through the use of ‘illegible mechanisms
of extraction, commodification, and control’(Zuboff, 2015: 75), new markets are created for
the use of personal data. This ‘Big Other’concentration of power over data ownership, security and
privacy puts at risk personal and collective freedoms; Cambridge Analytics data misuse being the
prime example of the day. In addition to this, our expanding sensor-based society (IoTTs) is now
driving the intensification of connection and monitoring online beyond the spaces of online social
and consumer life to an ever expanding list of activities such as self-tracking, smart homing, health
analytics, automated travel, school analytics and more.
Babies and children are clearly embedded actors within surveillance capitalism. Many unborn
children now have an online presence. Expectant parents often announce their pregnancy by posting
an ultrasound image of their foetus on Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest (Leaver, 2017). This
sharing practice is now being expanded and elaborated on with new rituals and postings, such as
videos of ultrasound clinic visits, gender reveal parties, infertility journey videos and memorials
for stillborn children. These postings usually include ultrasound images and other more detailed
information about the unborn child (Mascheroni and Holloway, in press).
Once born, babies’ online presence continues with parent postings which often share the name,
gender, birth weight and birth date of the newborns. Data are also captured via increasingly popular
baby wearables, monitoring devices that are fastened close to babies’ bodies that collect information
via Bluetooth and wifi technologies about babies’ health, location or identity (Mascheroni and
Holloway, 2018). Further data collection, analysis and sharing occur across a child’s different life
stages. Toddlers are choosing and viewing videos on YouTube and once they enter the education
system, the datafication of many aspects of children’s lives continues and expands. The tracking of
their learning activities and achievements, classroom behaviour, sport activities and health parameters
at school adds further data which now supplements and far outweighs data collected from
parental postings (Mascheroni and Holloway, in press).
Two recent events highlight how surveillance capitalism is clearly taking place in the lives of
children regardless of existing privacy regulations and rules such as the US Children’s Online
Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), the EU General Data Protection Regulation and the future ePrivacy
Regulation. First, researchers from The University of California have recently released results
on their analysis of the privacy practices within 5855 children’s Android apps. They found that
over half the apps analysed potentially violated COPPA and suggest that ‘it is not clear that industry
self-regulation has resulted in higher privacy standards; some of our data suggest the opposite.
Thus, industry self-regulation appears to be ineffective’(Reyes et al., 2018: 77). Second, on-selling
or sharing of children’s data is also occurring at an intensive rate. Recent figures released by
AdTech, a London-based digital marketing firm, shows that by the time a child turns 3 or 4, five
million data points have been collected by ‘adult Adtech delivering ads into kids and family digital
content’ (Harris, 2017). This rises to 72 million data points before a child reaches the age of 13.
AdTech’s use of data collection technology, which was initially built to capture adult users’ data,
now collects information about a child’s location, apps used, websites visited and device identifiers,
as well as more specific personalised data (Harris, 2017).
This not only breaches children’s privacy regulations but creates a new data-rich environment
that is changing power structures in a data economy which now operates without any meaningful
procedures for individual consent (Zuboff, 2015). This is particularly significant in the lives of
children as they are often too young to understand or consent (or who may not even be born, if their
parents post ultrasound scans). The future ramifications in terms of children’s sense of self and
healthy development, and their future ability to find, own, reclaim, contest or delete information
about themselves is uncertain.
30	 Media International Australia 170(1)
Children’s engagement in the market economy: then and now
Before the 18th century, children usually laboured alongside their parents. In pre-industrial societies,
children usually worked in childcare, hunting or gathering, farming and cottage crafts as soon
as they were competent. While children from poorer families were expected to contribute to the
economic survival of their family unit, social class was responsible for some variation in the lives
of children, with upper-class children seldom put to work (Fyfe, 2005).
Child as labourer
During the 19th century, child labour was seen as an economic opportunity rather than an ethical
problem, especially for poor families. Families moved to growing industrial cities so that they
could make a better living. However, extremely low wages led families to supplement their household
income by sending their children off to work as well. With growing production rates, the
industrial revolution also provided the chance for children to find work that, before then, was hard
to find. Indeed, historians suggest that by the 1830s, the more industrialised a nation was, the more
child labour opportunities there were (Fyfe, 2005).
The end of the 19th century saw the end of widespread child labour. This decline occurred in
stages with 5- to 9-year-olds being the first to leave the workforce around the 1850s, then 10- to
14-year-olds in the 1870s. However, children over 14 years of age remained in the workforce in
high numbers into the first few decades of the 20th century. There are a variety of reasons for the
decline of child labour in the United States and Europe. First, as income levels increased, especially
for the male household head, families could afford to choose to ‘invest in their children by
sending them to school’ (Fyfe, 2005: 4). In addition, as technology became more sophisticated and
machines could undertake more tasks, the demand for child labourers declined. Ideological changes
of the Romantic Movement, which demarcated childhood as a stage of life where child should be
free from the commitment of work and live a pleasurable and dependent lifestyle, put pressure on
the state to provide all children with the right to be free from work. These ideological changes,
along with frightful working conditions children laboured under, then saw changes to the law with
a series of Acts which progressively regulated children out of the workforce. These included the
1833 Factory Act in Britain and the 1864 Factories Act (extension) Act which reduced the number
of child labourers in potteries, the 1860 Mines Regulation and Inspection Act which banned boys
under 12 from working underground, and child labour regulations in Russia (1839), France (1874)
and the United States (1993). In addition to this, compulsory education was introduced in the late
1800s. For example, after the 1870 Education Act, it became compulsory for children age between
5 and 10 to attend school in Britain and a series of reforms in the 1880s required children attend
school in France (Fyfe, 2005). These reforms saw children effectively retreat from the paid labour
force into the domestic realm of home and school.
Child as consumer
The emergence of a product aimed at children can be traced back to the 16th century where books,
toys and clothes were made for the children of wealthy bourgeoisie and nobility (Luke, 1989)
although larger scale production began in the 18th century. This move to recognise children as
nascent commercial targets came about because of three main reasons. The earlier conceptual shift
in the late 1800s towards the Romantic notion that children personify a state of innocence, purity
and the goodness of nature, but who could be corrupted by the world outside, left children (especially
middle- and upper-class children) separated from adults and sequestered in the domestic
Holloway	 31
realm. This distinctiveness and separateness was then used in the commercial world as a way to
‘connect the child to the market’ (Cook, 2004: 23). In other words, new market meanings and categories
constructed the child as essentially separate and different from adults to create a distinct
market niche. Distinctive children’s products emerged with separate children’s departments appearing
in larger department stores and new advertising aimed directly at children (Ellis, 2011).
Children’s consumption is also associated with developments in the media and cultural industries.
While media is itself a product for children to consume, it also played a major role in shaping
children’s consumer culture (Buckingham, 2011). Children’s media texts often connected to other
commodities of interest to children. Illustrated stories and comic strips which introduced characters
whose images appeared in dolls, games and toys were available from the 1890s. By 1937,
Disney had mastered the art of tie-in marketing by selling Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
merchandise even before the movie was released. Over time, childhood became linked with a vast
interconnected industry built on licenced characters that encompassed movies, TV shows, video
games, toys and clothing. Moviemakers often joined forces with toy and fast food companies to
offer novelty toys in fast food meals. Video games, in the mid-1970s, first directed towards teens
and young adults, were marketed to children in the late 1970s with Atari, and by Nintendo and others
by the late 1980s. In addition, media-generated marketing to children created consumption
practices, where children were encouraged to accumulate whole ‘sets’ of dolls, toys, books and
videos. This marketing became ever more sophisticated with the Star Wars trilogy (1977–1983). In
addition to this, cartoon series based on existing toy and doll lines proliferated from the 1980s
onwards (Ellis, 2011).
Contemporary marketing to children is integrated with newer digital technologies.
Over the past twenty years, digitization has led to the emergence of a whole range of new technologies of
production, distribution and consumption. Previously distinct media forms and commodities have begun
to converge, as television programmes are linked to websites, films and computer games – and, of course,
to merchandising and advertising. (Buckingham, 2011: 84)
A diverse range of integrated marketing techniques is used to engage and capture children’s
attention. Product and brand placements occur within online virtual worlds and gaming sites.
Advergaming, the use of video game platforms to promote products to children, is also used, as
well as the use of data mining in order to provide more personalised (wants and needs) advertising
to children (Buckingham, 2011). Buckingham (2011) described data mining as ‘the gathering of
data about consumers based on their responses to online requests, or (more covertly) through the
use of cookies that track their movements online’ (2011: 99). These data mining activities have
since evolved and expanded over a short period to produce ‘treasured resources that can ostensibly
be mined, enriched, and repurposed into precious products’ (van Dijck, 2014: 199) themselves.
Child as data source
These days, children have been again inducted into the market economy as economic objects. This
time, however, it is the data they supply rather than their direct physical labour that have economic
value under surveillance capitalism. These data include information about children’s interactions
and content creation in virtual worlds and social networks, self-tracking of children via baby wearables,
watches, fit-bits, connected toys and smartphones. For example, young YouTube viewers
provide YouTube viewer data on highly viewed videos within a 2- to 5-year-old age range which
is then provided to advertisers to create company profit. Pokemon Go, as a location-based game,
collects the names and locations of its users. However, it also accesses the contents of children’s
32	 Media International Australia 170(1)
USB storage, their accounts, photographs, network connections and phone activities, and can even
activate their device, when it is in standby mode. Niantic, Pokemon Go’s developer, also reserves
the right to share all the data it collects with third parties, such as digital marketing firms and advertisers,
to enable it to bring in extra revenue (Rottenberg, 2016).
Under surveillance capitalism, and thanks to much improved technical capacities such as
improved storage andAI (artificial intelligence) analytics and an increasing number of data sources,
commercial entities have increasing access to larger volumes of data for the marketing and sale of
products and services (including the on-selling of datasets). Thus, children’s movements, bodies,
play activities, communications and social and cognitive development are now digitisable and
commodifiable. This data surveillance also tends to normalise a surveillance culture by making
what was once an uncommon practice (digital surveillance) so common that it seems unremarkable.
Nonetheless, the long-term consequences on children’s self-development are hard to predict
(Mascheroni and Holloway, 2018).
While the collection and use of children’s data raise issues regarding children’s privacy, concerns
have also been raised about the loss of control of personal data, as well as ‘the potential for
direct or inadvertent discrimination and profiling, scope creep and technological dependency –
resulting in restrictions on access to vital services’ (Berman and Albright, 2017: 20). Children’s
data can be subject to collection and analytical procedures that skew results and discriminate
against individual children or groups of children. This occurs when algorithms are based on inaccurate
assumptions about a vulnerable group of children when using data such as health profiles or
geolocation. It also occurs when there is underrepresentation or overrepresentation of a vulnerable
or marginalised cohort of children leading to incorrect inferences and decisions being made.
Furthermore, these skewed results and subsequent discrimination also happens as a result of an
overreliance on a specific data source. In this case, more detailed and verifiable methods or multiple
methods which enables triangulation of results are disregarded (Barocas, 2014). Another driver
of this discrimination is when datasets are moved out of the context in which they were collected
(by on-sellers and data brokers), thus becoming more unreliable (Nissenbaum, 2009). School
behavioural data, for instance, data found in classroom behaviour modelling apps such as
ClassDojo, may be taken out of a local, class and age-based context and used to assess and categorise
an individual’s behaviour beyond the context of the child’s age and their specific classroom.
While the collection of children’s data can produce skewed and discriminatory data, it can also
result in both indirect and direct benefits for children. In the field of education, data collection and
analytics provide information that can personalise children’s learning and provide supportive interventions
to enhance educational opportunity. Health care provision (both preventive and responsive
care) is also enhanced through big data analysis. Aggregated and disaggregated data can be
used to identify groups or locales in need of certain prevention or mitigation services – such as the
tracking of communicable diseases and the provision of vaccination services. The identification of
young children in crisis mapping operations facilitates the provision of food and shelter to these
children who are particularly susceptible to malnourishment and death (Moestue and Muggah,
2014). The detection of crimes such as child abuse is enhanced through the use of data analysis.
Abusers and distributers of child abuse materials are currently being tagged while online or in
cloud-based storage – and more readily identified and located by crime enforcement bodies
(Berman and Albright, 2017).
The case of connected toys
Highly publicised breaches involving connected toys highlight the economic value of children’s
data under surveillance capitalism. These breaches include the hacking of Mattel’s Wi-Fi Hello
Holloway	 33
Barbie™ (Nov, 2015), VTech’s Learning Lodge™ (Nov, 2015) and CloudPets™. Other hacks or
breaches have been carried out by consumer groups and ‘white hat’ hackers who point out the
lack of data protection built into connected toys and their support infrastructure. Research carried
out by the Norwegian Consumer Council (2017) related to Genesis’toys, My Friend Cayla™
and iQue Intellegeny Robot™ (Bureau Européen des Unions de Consommateurs, 2016) and
children’s smart watches point towards these vulnerabilities. In addition, the German government
has named My Friend Cayla™ doll (a toy similar to Hello Barbie™) as an ‘illegal espionage
apparatus’ because ‘under German law it is illegal to manufacture, sell or possess
surveillance devices disguised as another object’ (Walker, 2017). Later that year, the same government
banned the use of children’s smart watches because ‘Via an app, parents can use such
children’s watches to listen unnoticed to the child’s environment and they are to be regarded as
an unauthorised transmitting system’ (Wakefield, 2017).
When IoToys data breaches are made public, the size and significance of the data held by IoToys
manufacturers and their service providers are also made clear. In the case of the 2015 VTech
breach, ‘about 2.2 million parents had registered and created accounts with Learning Lodge for
nearly 3 million children’ (Federal Trade Commission, 2018). A more recent data breach, on
CloudPets™’ database left over 820,000 user accounts open to theft. The user profiles included
profile photos, children’s names, as well as the month and day of their birth. The profiles also contained
the child’s relationship to adults who have been authorised to share messages with the child,
such as parents, grandparents and aunts (Hunt, 2017). At this stage, it seems that some toy manufacturers
lack the technical expertise or are hesitant to employ or contract out this expertise in order
to sufficiently protect children’s data – and little transparency or independent oversight takes place
at this stage regarding children’s online data.
CloudPets™ data breach
Children’s voices and data were leaked during a data breach involving CloudPets™ database in
2017. CloudPets™ are Internet-connected soft toys made by Spiral Toys, based in California.
These toys allow parents and their children to send voice messages to each other through the toy
itself. The toys are embedded with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology that connects to parents’
smartphones so that up to six family members can send voice messages to the toy, and the
child can send voice messages back. The app enabled toys can also play lullabies and narrate children’s
stories via the toy’s speakers. Family members use the CloudPets™ app to send messages
to their children and children use the toy itself to receive and send messages. Children squeeze the
toy’s left paw to receive messages and the right paw to record messages to be sent via cloud storage
to family members (Jackobson, 2015).
Security expert and creator of Have I Been Pwned? (a data breach search website that
allows the general public to see if their personal information has been compromised) found
that the CloudPets™’ database had been breached in February 2017. He noted that children’s
data were stored in a highly insecure database, a ‘MongoDB that was in a publicly facing network
segment without any authentication required and had been indexed by Shodan (a popular
search engine for finding connected things)’ (Hunt, 2017). At the time, the database held over
2,182,337 voice recordings from both children and adults. Hunt and others followed the database
comings and goings over a 6-week period noting that ‘CloudPets data was accessed many
times by unauthorised parties before being deleted and then on multiple occasions, held for
ransom’ (Hunt, 2017).
Over this period, many attempts were made to notify Spiral Toys by email and telephone.
Messages were also left on the company’s Facebook and Twitter accounts. These messages went
34	 Media International Australia 170(1)
unanswered. Over this same period, parents were not informed of the breach by Spiral Toys, a
requirement of the Californian government where the company is located (Hunt, 2017).
Hunt was notified of the breach by an acquaintance involved in data breach trading circles.
These trading circles redistribute stolen databases extensively for either financial gain or as a
hobby. The breached databases ‘often spread well beyond the party that originally obtained it and
the ease with which huge volumes of digital information can be replicated across the globe means
that once it’s exposed, it spreads rapidly’ (House Committee on Energy and Commerce, 2017: 2).
In his testimony to the US House Committee on Energy and Commerce (2017) ‘Identity Verification
in a Post-Breach World’ inquiry, Hunt also noted that
The rapid emergence of cheap, easily accessible cloud services has accelerated the growth of other online
services collecting data. Further to that, the rapidly emerging ‘Internet of Things’ is enabling us to digitise
all new classes of information thus exposing them to the risk of a data breach. (p. 2)
To date, Spiral Toys and other toy manufacturers have been allowed to self-regulate with regard
to data privacy and safety. The CloudPets™ event, nonetheless, indicates that the rapid uptake of
cheaper cloud-based database platforms is part of the problem in that these databases are often
unsecured and easily hacked. Some toy companies, for instance, Cognitoys, are taking their responsibilities
seriously and incorporate best practice in their toy design and infrastructure security
(Knowles et al., 2018). Others, such as Spiral Toys, generally lack the skill set and technical infrastructure
required to venture unsupported into the IoToys space. Given the current susceptibility of
IoToys to hacking at a local (Bluetooth) level as well as database level, it is obvious that this selfregulatory
environment in not working.
Conclusion
Contemporary childhood has (and is) undergoing a profound transformation, where information
about children’s bodies, play and social interaction is migrating to the digital realm. Industry has
taken note of these changes, creating many opportunities for children to be tracked, play and
socialise online including new, screen-less platforms such as wearables, virtual assistants and
connected toys. At the same time as industry is creating opportunities for children’s cultural participation
online, they are, however, gathering vast amounts of user/child information, either surreptitiously
or with the consent of children or parents – who recognise that opting out of data
collection and sharing practices may diminish the user experience. In addition, a digital black
market is emerging where children’s data are traded within data breach trading circles or held for
a bitcoin ransom.
This is the first time since children retreated from the paid labour force in the late 19th and early
20th centuries that their activities are of any significant economic value. Under surveillance capitalism,
children have been positioned as data sources and at the same time subjects of market relations.
The use of wearables, virtual assistants and connected toys equipped with a growing number
of sensors such as audio, visual, haptic, location, temperature and moisture sensors (think smart
nappies) increases the number of transmission points and data points and lifts data collection possibilities
to a whole new level.
As new technologies are designed to capture and respond to children’s everyday experiences
more and more seamlessly, their bodies, activities and social experiences are being tracked and
datified. While there is a need to educate children and their parents about digital data collection and
ownership and how this may have an effect on them into the future, of greater importance (in terms
of children who are often too young to consent or understand the full possible consequences of
Holloway	 35
their consent) is the need for consolidated work towards a code of conduct and further regulation
with regard to the ownership of children’s data from production through to sale.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article: This articles forms part of an Australian Research Council project The Internet of Toys:
Benefits and risks of connected toys for children (DP 1801039220).
ORCID iD
Donell Holloway https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2202-5551
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