Datafied Citizens in the Age of Coerced Digital Participation

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between surveillance capitalism, big data, and the emergence of a new type of datafied citizenship by looking at two different, yet interconnected, dimensions. In the first place, it considers how under surveillance capitalism individuals are being profiled simultaneously as consumer and citizen subjects by a complex political economic infrastructure that brings private and public entities together. In the second place, it argues that surveillance capitalism depends on the systematic coercion of digital participation, which forces citizens to comply with data technologies and give up their personal data. If we want to understand the extent of these transformation, the article argues, we need to look at children. Children have traditionally been excluded from debates about citizenship because they have often been understood as not-yet citizens or future citizens. Yet, in the study of the relationship between data and citizenship, children today are the key. They are the very first generation of citizens who are datafied from before they are born and are coerced into digitally participating to society through the data traces produced, collected, and processed by others without their consent or control. Drawing on the findings of the Child | Data | Citizen project, an ethnographically informed research project on big data and family life in the UK and US, this article will highlight some of the democratic challenges that emerge when we think about data, surveillance capitalism, and citizenship in everyday life.

Keywords

citizenship coerced digital participation data governance data privacy datafication digital resignation surveillance capitalism

Introduction

One of the critical questions that is emerging with the rapid expansion of big data in everyday life concerns the understanding of the complex relationship between the gathering and processing of large amounts of personal data, the rise of new forms of neoliberal governance and surveillance, and the emergence of new understandings of citizenship. The notion of big data was at first introduced to start to make sense of the concentration of information in large data sets, which required supercomputers and hence the term ‘big’ data (Manovich, 2011). However, in the last 5 years, the term has been used to highlight the fact that web giants, businesses, and governing institutions have started to transform all the different aspects of human experience into data and can now cross-reference large amounts of personal information (Mayer-Schonberger and Cukier, 2013). These transformations, coupled with key developments in artificial intelligence and technologies of biometric data collection, are triggering critical questions about the relationship between data and citizenship. This is because it is increasingly becoming evident that data technologies are the means through which citizens are surveilled and governed (Andrejevic, 2013; Cheney-Lippold, 2017; Kitchin, 2014; Lyon, 2014).

This article argues that we need to explore the emergence of the ‘datafied citizen’ (Barassi, 2016, 2017; Hintz et al., 2017, 2018) by looking at two different, yet interconnected, dimensions. In the first place, we need to consider how under surveillance capitalism (Bellamy-Foster and McChesney, 2014; Zuboff, 2015, 2019) the boundary between consumer data and citizen data is becoming more blurred and individuals are being profiled simultaneously as consumer and citizen subjects by a complex political economic and technological infrastructure that brings private and public entities together. In the second place, we need to highlight the fact that surveillance capitalism is often based on the coercion of digital participation. The understanding that digital participation takes many forms is of course not new. Kelty et al. (2015) explored seven different dimensions of digital participation. However, in their work, little attention is paid to the fact that participation is increasingly ‘coerced’.

The term coercion is used here with reference to classical understanding of voluntary and coerced citizen participation, where coercion does not imply the use of force or violence but refers to ‘forced compliance’ with structures, policies, and regulations (Milakovich, 2012: 31). In our data-driven cultures, citizens are constantly forced to comply and provide their personal data. Sometimes, this forced compliance happens in physical ways (e.g. facial recognition technologies in airports). Other times, it happens simply because their lives increasingly unfold in data-driven environments, which rely on automated decision making. The notion of coercion of digital participation is also used here to highlight the violence of digital profiling and the fact that data traces speak for and about individual lives in ways that go beyond individual choice or control.

The article contends that in order to analyze the everyday coercion of digital participation and the making of datafied citizens, we need to look at children. Children have traditionally been excluded from debates about citizenship and public life because they have often been understood as not-yet citizens or future citizens (Coady, 2009; Nolas et al., 2016). Yet, in the study of the relationship between data and citizenship, children are the key. In fact, children today are the very first generation of citizens who are datafied from before they are born and are coerced into digitally participating to society through the data traces produced by others. Drawing on the findings of the Child | Data | Citizen project, an ethnographically informed research project on big data and family life, this article will focus on the everyday datafication of children and the ‘coercion’ of digital participation. By looking at the tensions that arise as families make sense of these processes of datafication and coercion, the aim of the article is to highlight some of the democratic challenges that emerge when we think about data, surveillance capitalism, and citizenship in everyday life.

The datafication of citizens

The profiling of citizens: beyond models of big brother surveillance

From the censuses of ancient civilizations to the establishment of the modern nation state, societies have historically surveilled and governed citizens through their personal data (Hintz et al., 2018). However, the 1970s and 1980s brought about a significant transformation in data monitoring. Clarke (1988) coined the term ‘dataveillance’ to describe this transformation, which saw the reduction in practices of face-to-face surveillance and an increase in the surveillance of citizens’ data. According to Clarke (1988), the increased surveillance of citizen’s data was made possible not only by emerging technologies and digital practices but also by the fact that governing bodies and institutions encouraged and reinforced the production of citizen’s data traces. Developing further this understanding, the legal scholars Hildebrandt and Gutwirth (2008) argued that – at the beginning of the 2000s – dataveillant practices were integrated with new technologies for identification and authentication of individual citizens.

These techno-historical transformations that occurred at the turn of the century led to the emergence of the digital profiling of citizens. The works of Solove (2004) and Elmer (2004) were groundbreaking in this understanding. Elmer (2004) believed that we needed to consider the key role played by profiling machines in the governing of citizens. In fact, he thought that the concept of surveillance did not capture the multiplicity of digital processes that required and requested the personal data of users, in order to automatically store it, share it, and cross-reference it. Similarly, Solove (2004) argued that digital technologies enabled the construction of digital dossiers of the person. In contrast to those scholars who focused on surveillance and the metaphor of Big Brother, Solove (2004) believed that we needed to focus on ‘profiling’ and refer to the Kafkian metaphor of The Trial if we wanted to understand the social impact of digital dossiers. According to Solove (2004), Kafka depicted ‘an indifferent bureaucracy, where individuals are pawns, not knowing what is happening, having no say or ability to exercise meaningful control over the process’ (p. 37). He warned against the democratic challenges involved in digital profiling. In fact, he showed that in databases, the personal information of individuals was subjected to the bureaucratic process with little intelligent control or limitation. It was the automated systems of the bureaucratic machine that determined whether someone could board a flight, buy an insurance, or be a good employee (Solove, 2004: 39).

The rise of digital profiling, as Elmer (2004) and Solove (2004) had argued, was enabled by a complex political economic infrastructure that brought together businesses, governing institutions, and tech companies. According to Bellamy-Foster and McChesney (2014), this was the political economic infrastructure of surveillance capitalism. In a groundbreaking paper, the scholars argued that surveillance capitalism established itself over the last century as a political economic system defined by the relations of power between governments, military powers, secret agencies, the financial sector, advertisers, Internet monopolies, and multiple other agents who surveilled, controlled, and capitalized on individual data (Bellamy-Foster and McChesney, 2014). In her work, Zuboff (2015, 2019) brought their argument further and argued that the advent of big data was thus made possible by the ever-growing networked infrastructure of surveillance capitalism, which constantly sought new ways to turn personal data into profit, to abstract meaning from everyday digital practices and to profile individuals for marketing purposes.

The digital profiling of citizens, therefore, has become a key dimension of our data-driven cultures. Under surveillance capitalism, the question at heart is not only about the surveillance of citizen’s data but about the complex ways in which these data are used to govern and profile individuals in often unjust and discriminatory ways (Cheney-Lippold, 2017; Eubanks, 2018; Gangadharan, 2012; Hintz et al., 2018). What is becoming evident is the fact that governing institutions and other agents are using automated and (often privately owned) data-driven systems to make key choices about citizen’s lives (Eubanks, 2018). The speed of technological change and the rapid transformation in governing models make it very difficult for us to have a clear picture of what is happening at the moment. While it is clear that individuals are being constructed as data subjects and these constructions are impacting on their lives in a variety of ways, it is also clear that these processes of algorithmic definition and construction escape our control (Cheney-Lippold, 2017; Pasquale, 2015).

It is for this reason that we need to take a step back and critically consider the very notion of data subject. It is only by critically questioning what we mean when we talk about data subjects that we can start unpacking the social and political implications of digital profiling.

The data subject? Blurring the boundary between the consumer and citizen subject

In understanding the construction of ‘data subject’, much attention has been placed to the notion of consumer subject. In 2014, for instance, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC; 2014) published a report on how data broking practices and predictive analytics were impacting on consumer choices and their access to the market. What surprised me when I read the report was the fact that although the FTC was highlighting the fact that data brokers gathered and processed large quantities of personal data, which included voting registration or other dimensions of one’s civic life, they kept referring to the data subject as ‘consumer subject’. However, as argued elsewhere (Barassi, 2018b), if the data collected about an individual relate to voting registration or details about one’s own religion, ethnicity, and so on, then we are not simply talking about consumers and consumers’ rights, but citizens’ and citizens’ rights. Hence, the data subject becomes simultaneously a consumer subject and a citizen subject.

By implying that the data subject needs to be considered also as a citizen subject, I do not wish to suggest that the citizen is not a consumer and vice versa. Key examples of the multifacetedness of consumer/citizen relations can be found, for instance, if we consider consumer activism (Lekakis, 2013). However, I believe that it is important to appreciate that – in the emerging infrastructure of surveillance capitalism as described by Zuboff (2019) – individuals give their consent to share their consumer choices with companies and advertisers, but these data are often used for political purposes or to profile them as citizen subjects.

The 2018 Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal was perhaps the very first example in the public domain of the multiple ways in which personal data are used not only for consumer transactions (e.g. providing personalized services, determining the price consumers get for things, or the access they have to specific products) but also to shape civic and democratic choices (e.g. individuals are profiled politically and fed specific news content to influence electoral choices). Following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, we have been faced with other examples where it has become clear that the boundary between citizen and consumer data is becoming increasingly blurred. Here, I am referring to examples such as Amazon selling facial recognition software to law enforcement in the US or the Labor Party in the UK who recently bought the data of new mothers or mothers-to-be to politically profile them. In this framework, the ‘data subject’ is much more than an individual consumer or a user sorted by one’s own choices; it is a citizen whose freedoms and rights are highly dependent on the ways in which he or she is being profiled.

It is precisely because the line between citizen/consumer data is becoming so blurred that at present, we are seeing the emergence of new public debates, lawsuits, and regulations that are aimed at addressing this societal transformation. In the EU, the implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in May 2018 is holding businesses, organizations, and institutions accountable for protecting individual privacy. In the US, over the last year, we witnessed the first lawsuits that address the problem of inaccurate profiling and data harm. Despite these changes, research on the complex relationship between data and citizenship is just emerging, and scholars are only starting to understand what it means to talk about the emergence of the datafied citizen.

The work of Cheney-Lippold (2017) is perhaps one of the first to really address this transformation. Cheney-Lippold (2017) argues that we need to pay particular attention to an emerging understanding of citizenship which is governed by the ius algorithmi. According to him, the ius algorithmi is similar to other types of laws that control citizenship, such as ius soli (based on territory) or ius sanguinis (based on blood ties), because it is a formal citizenship used by governing bodies and institutions. Yet, what differentiates the ius algorithmi from the rest is that this is an informationalized citizenship that is constantly re-valued according to users’ datafied behavior. In his work, he mentions as example of ius algorithmi the fact that the National Security Agency (NSA) implemented a data-based assessment that assigned ‘foreignness’ or ‘citizenship’ to Internet traffic in order to authorize the legal surveillance of any subject who was deemed to be at least 51% foreign.

What emerges well from Cheney-Lippold’s (2017) work is that individual data and datafied behavior are used to construct data subjects as citizen subjects. The understanding that under surveillance capitalism citizens subjects are built through the cross-referencing and profiling of personal data is just one dimension of the emergence of the datafied citizen. Another key aspect that we need to take into account, as we shall see here below, is the fact that digital participation is being transformed. In fact, as argued elsewhere (Barassi, 2017), we are increasingly witnessing the rise of a new form of digital participation that is no longer only voluntary (e.g. people choosing to post on social media) but is increasingly being coerced.

Datafied citizens and the coercion of digital participation

In recent years, different scholars have discussed the problem of lack of choice and privacy trade-off when reflecting on digital participation (Hargittai and Marwick, 2016; Turow et al., 2015). They have shown that, in our data-driven societies, individuals feel that they ‘have little choice’ and give up personal data just to be able to access specific platforms and services. A fantastic review of this literature can be found in Draper and Turow’s (2019) recent article. The article argues that we are living at an historical time when digital resignation has not only become the norm for users but it is also constantly ‘cultivated’ by corporations, who encourage and reinforce it. Although interesting, when we think about the complex relationship between data, surveillance capitalism, and citizenship, we need to realize that surveillance capitalism does not only rely on the ‘cultivation of digital resignation’ (Draper and Turow, 2019) but also on the ‘force compliance’ to provide personal data through the systematic coercion of digital participation.

One of the main changes brought about by big data is the fact that the institutions and businesses that individuals encounter in their everyday life (e.g. health providers, education institutions, local governments, police and border agents, etc.) are increasingly relying on automated and data-driven services. In this context, as we shall see later, individuals are not only ‘resigning’ to digitally participate, they are actually ‘forced’ to do so. The notion of ‘coercion’ is therefore used here not to imply the use of force or violence, but to highlight a ‘forced compliance’ with structures, policies, and regulations (Milakovich, 2012: 31). Individuals are forced to comply and provide their data, otherwise they risk physical consequences (e.g. let us image someone who refuses to have finger prints or iris taken at the border) or social and personal consequences in the sense that they would be left out from important areas of social life (e.g. refusing to use an educational software as a university student).

It is through the everyday coercion of digital participation by a plurality of corporate (social media platforms, home technologies, etc.) and non-corporate (the school, the doctor, the local government, the border enforcement, etc.), agents are enabling the datafication of citizens.

To really understand the extent of this transformation and the coercion of digital participation, it is important that we turn our attention to the datafication of children. Children are key to the understanding of how citizenship is being transformed by our data-driven cultures. They are the very first generation of citizens who are coerced into ‘digitally participating’ to society, from before they are born, because their personal data is digitized, shared, stored, analyzed, and exploited for them by others. Children have traditionally been excluded from debates about citizenship and public life (Nolas et al., 2016). In western liberal thought, they have always been stripped from their autonomy and agency by subordinating them to adults and describing them as non-citizens or future citizens (Coady, 2009). However, in the last 30 years or so – since the founding of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child – there has been a move from an understanding of children as subordinate to adults and needing protection to that of appreciating that children were self-determined citizens with specific rights (Earls, 2011). Yet also in the discourse about children’s rights, children needs’ and interests are often not taken into consideration., especially in relation to data privacy rights (Livingstone and Third, 2018).

In fact, the new data environments we live in are exacerbating the lack of agency and autonomy of children in defining themselves as citizen subjects. While as Third and Collins (2016) have rightly argued, digital environments have provided children and youth with the possibility to perform their public selves online. Under surveillance capitalism, children are being datafied in ways that were not possible before. Today, from the moment of conception, a child’s information is not only mediated through different means of medical mediation (Lupton and Williamson, 2017) but important biometric information is uploaded on social media or pregnancy apps (Barassi, 2017; Leaver, 2017; Lupton and Thomas, 2015). Once individuals are born, their information is shared on a variety of technologies from baby apps to baby monitors, health-trackers, or social media. However, all these different forms of data monitoring are just the tip of the iceberg, and the picture becomes much more complex if we consider how the home is being transformed by the inclusion of smart technologies and artificial intelligence systems.

In these datafied environments, children are stripped from their autonomy not only because ‘parent consent’ is used for gaining lawful rights to process children’s data but also because children’s data traces are produced, shared, collected, and processed by others beyond their consent or control. In different sectors of their everyday life, from education (Williamson, 2017) to entertainment and health, children’s data traces are used to find out their behavioral patterns, to make assumptions about their psychological and behavioral tendencies and to construct narratives about who they are. These narratives are often based on the social context in which they grow up in. As Taylor (2017) argued, in fact, data technologies often sort, profile, and inform action based on group rather than individual characteristics and behavior (ethnicity, class, family, etc.). Therefore, children are being profiled on the basis of the families and the social groups they belong to. Children have historically been profiled on the basis of the families and the social groups they belong to. However, today these classifications might follow them throughout their life span in ways that was not possible before. This does not only reproduce existing inequalities and stall social mobility (Eubanks, 2018) but it also impacts on their right to self-definition and moral autonomy (Nissenbaum, 2009). Therefore, when we think about the datafication of childhood, critical questions are emerging about the ways in which children are being datafied into citizen subjects from before they are born. Looking at the datafication of childhood and at the everyday coercion of digital participation can enable us to start asking and tackling critical questions about our democratic futures.

The making of datafied citizens: everyday digital routines and the coercion of digital participation

The Child | Data | Citizen Project

To study the datafication of citizens and children implies that we understand that ‘datafication’ is a complex and messy process defined by an incredible and almost untraceable plurality of digital practices and technologies that lead to the construction of multiple and contradictory predictions. As different scholars have shown, unpacking the ethnographic dimension of datafication enables us to move away from data-centric and political economic perspectives that tend to obscure the analysis of lived experience and everyday negotiations (Barassi, 2017; Couldry and Powell, 2014; Pink et al., 2018).

When I launched the Child | Data | Citizen project in 2016, I was influenced by this understanding. The Child | Data | Citizen project aimed at critically addressing the complex relation between the datafication of childhood and the emergence of new forms of datafied citizenship. However, rather than focusing on the datafied citizen/child as a quantifiable object of study, I looked at the everyday datafication of children and coercion of digital participation as a social process. The research relied on a multi-method approach that combined the following: 2 years of auto-ethnographic research; 50 semi-structured in-depth interviews with parents with children from 0 to 13 years of age (whose personal information is regulated by Child Online Privacy Protection Act); 8 months of digital ethnography of parents ‘sharenting’ practices on the social media accounts of eight families; and the platform analysis of four social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat, and Twitter), 10 health-tracking apps (baby apps and pregnancy apps), four Home Hubs, and four educational platforms.

Methodologically, the project was based on the belief that in order to understand the multiple and complex ways in which datafication was transforming family life, I needed to consider the relationship between UK and US contexts. Much of the digital technologies that families in the UK use today are produced within the US. Therefore, a cross-cultural analysis between UK and US contexts can enable us to shed light not only on how big data and digital surveillance are being negotiated in different social contexts but also on the fact that the use of the same digital technologies is often defined by completely different cultural understandings of online privacy. As the mother of young girls, I carried out 2 years of auto-ethnography and participant observation documenting what it felt to live in two different cities like London and Los Angeles with different data environments. I investigated how my children were being datafied.

I also carried out 50 semi-structured interviews. In both cities, I interviewed parents who came from a variety of cultural, ethnic, and national backgrounds. The parents were extraordinarily diverse not only in terms of ethnicity (e.g. Asian, Latinos, Indian, Black, Indigenous, Multiracial, and White) but also in terms of cultural and national heritage (e.g. Afghani, Mexican, Brazilian, Indian, German, Italian, Hungarian, Icelandic, Zimbabwe, Scottish, etc.). I also made a genuine attempt to seek parents from different classes, by interviewing parents working on low-income jobs (such as nannies, cleaners, buskers, or admin) as well as parents working in high-income jobs (such as lawyers, film-producers, journalists, marketing, etc.). I also came across a plurality of family situations that challenged the hetero-normativity of the ‘nuclear family’, and I interviewed gay parents, parents who were divorced and had to juggle with a complex living arrangement, and single mothers who chose to adopt a child. It was during this multi-method research project that I investigated how families were experiencing the coercion of digital participation.

The everyday coercion of digital participation

In 2018, during fieldwork, I was traveling through London Heathrow airport with my daughters. As soon as we reached security, an officer looked at our passports and asked P (4 years old) to look up and not to smile for the camera. After she dutifully obeyed, he took a small, black device and scanned the face of A (9 months old). I felt uncomfortable and violated. I asked him why he was scanning my baby’s face. He looked annoyed and explained that it was for security purposes. Facial recognition was being used as an anti-terror measure to prevent passengers traveling on international flights swapping their boarding cards with passengers from domestic flights. Obviously, this was not a new security measure. Facial recognition technologies at Heathrow were introduced more than 7 years earlier. However, I felt that this year the pervasiveness of facial recognition technologies at Heathrow was more evident than other years, especially after a change in policy by British Airways who introduced new facial recognition technologies in the airport. As I walked through security, I felt a chilling feeling in my bones and wondered whether I would have felt worse if the officer took my children’s fingerprints or scanned their irises. Maybe I would have been more outraged. Yet, the result is very similar. The face, like fingerprints, the iris, or even the ear canal are all used now to carry out ID checks; they are all classified as biometric data. What also bothered me that day was the fact that my baby’s face was not only scanned by the security agent but also by British Airways. Yet, nobody asked for my formal consent or informed me about the ways in which that data were going to be used.

The gathering of children’s facial recognition at airports is just one of the multiple examples of data traces that are collected on a daily basis in a way that leaves us no choice and forces us to comply. One afternoon in March 2017, for instance, I interviewed Alexandra. Alexandra had migrated to England, from Eastern Europe, and lived in a small flat in South East London with her two children aged 8 and 10 and her husband who came from Nigeria. In her interview, she told me how difficult it was for her to adapt to the digitization and datafication of everything:

A: Everything changed everything went online, like online banking … they make it impossible to go to the branch because they are closing branches down so I end up using it […] But also, the kids’ school now everything is online […] At the doctor I use the online booking, again I don’t really know how to use it, and it is frustrating but our GP surgery has become so busy that sometimes I need to wait 4 or 5 weeks to see a doctor, but if I go online I would find an appointment.

Few months later, I was having dinner with Ana and her two boys in Los Angeles. That evening at dinner, Ana discussed her eldest’s new preschool, how good it was and convenient, and showed me the pictures and notes on the school app. She was excited about the fact that she could share information about her child’s absences, allergies, and anything else. I asked her if she knew what the data policy of the app was and whether she read the terms and conditions, and she looked at me, laughed, and said, ‘of course not, and also what choice would I have?’

During my research, I met many examples of parents like Alexandra or Ana who felt that they had no choice and that they had to join the services and agreed to their terms and conditions or they (and their children) would be cut out from important dimensions of social life.

During the interviews, I asked parents to think about the data flows of their children by reflecting on all the different services and platforms that they used. Parents described a vast plurality of platforms from entertainment activities, home technologies, and mobile apps to educational and medical software. I also asked them how they felt about the systematic and relentless collection of their children’s personal data, and in the great majority of cases, they felt uncomfortable. However, while some actively sought to read the terms and conditions and to come up with possible solutions to try and protect their children, others felt that they could not do anything about it. With their similarities and differences, the parents I worked with revealed what it means to experience and negotiate on a daily basis with the datafication of family life. Parents often told me that they felt a sense of unease and worry as well as a perception of inevitability and powerlessness.

Now these feelings of powerlessness and inevitability are beautifully described in the work of Draper and Turow (2019) on digital resignation. Yet, we need to push our understanding further and appreciate that parents like Alexandra and Ana are not just ‘resigning’ to digitally participating because they want to use specific services (Draper and Turow, 2019), but they are forced to comply and share their personal data, otherwise they would be excluded from key dimensions of civic life such as the school, the doctor, the bank, and so on.

One of the most complex aspects that we face when we think about the ‘coercion of digital participation’ in family life is represented by the fact that by agreeing (or resigning) to obscure terms and conditions with private corporations, parents enable the coercion of the digital participation of their children. Sometimes, they do so by willingly choosing to share the personal data of their children with technologies that make it very difficult to ‘opt out’. This latter point emerged vividly in my study of pregnancy apps (Barassi, 2017). During the research, I realized that the data policies of pregnancy apps were challenging to understand, and that they made the option of opting out for parents extraordinarily difficult. In one instance, for example, I tried to ‘opt out’ from the services of a baby app that was connected to a web platform. As I followed the instructions on how to do so, I was linked to a separate page titled ‘Adobe Privacy Centre’. At that point, I had to scroll down in order to find a yellow ‘opt out’ plug. Once I clicked on the plug, I was directed to another page that explained that the ‘opt out’ plug works exclusively for a specific browser on a specific computer and only if I did not delete the cookies. ‘Opting out’ therefore did not mean that the information of my individual user profile (and the one of my baby) was deleted or was not passed on to third parties by the company itself. Of course, the research on pregnancy apps took place before the implementation of GDPR in Europe, and data policies are less ambiguous in Europe. Even if data policies are often written in a more accessible manner, it is very difficult to understand what happens to personal data and to provide a meaningful informed consent as a parent.

Other times, parents enable the coercion of digital participation using technologies that are not designed or targeted at children, but nevertheless are used by them. This became evident to me when, in September 2018, I submitted a report titled ‘Home Life Data and Children’s Privacy Report’ (Barassi, 2018a) to the Information Commissioner’s Office in the UK, which was used as evidence for the importance of the development of age-appropriate design code. In the report, I argue that firms currently fail to recognize the privacy implications of children’s daily interactions with home automation technologies that are not designed or targeted at them. I also argue that the data of children that are being collected from home automation technologies are not only personal (individual) data but are ‘home life data’, a mix of family data, household data, and highly contextual data. The problem with current terms and conditions is that they always refer to personal data, and there is little scrutiny or understanding of what happens to the data generated by the aggregation of adult and children profiles.

In the report, I also used my fieldnotes to discuss the difficulties I encountered in making sense of the data policy of a home hub:

I don’t understand, I feel so incompetent and frustrated. I have been reading the privacy policy again and again but fail to understand it. It is clear that the company recognizes that children interact with the virtual assistants or can create their own profiles connected to the adults. Yet I can’t find an exhaustive description or explanation of the ways in which their data is used. […].

In the age of coerced digital participation, therefore, we need to reflect on the slipperiness and complexity of the very notion of ‘consent’ for both parents and children. My research revealed that the coercion of digital participation is creating a great deal of frustration among parents, who feel trapped and forced to comply. This feeling of entrapment and forced compliance cannot be understood without exploring the shared anxiety among parents about their children’s about how the data traces will impact on their children’s future public lives. This is not surprising, as Pink et al. (2018) have argued that data anxieties emerge because they are often interconnected with the impossibility of knowing the future (p. 2). This is particularly true if we consider children–parents relations. As Livingstone and Sefton-Green (2016) have argued, young people and children are often negated the ‘here and now’ and are referred to what they ‘may become’. The future is therefore an ontological and imaginary construct that plays a fundamental role in the relationship between adults and children (Livingstone and Sefton-Green, 2016: 213). As the next part of the article will show, we cannot understand the datafication of childhood and the coercion of digital participation in family life without exploring how parents are actively making sense of the data traces they produce and the ways these traces may be impacting on their children’s future as citizen subjects.

The child as datafied citizen: data traces and the profiling of children

During the 2016 US Presidential Elections, I met up for a coffee and interview with Jen in West Los Angeles. I had known Jen for few months, and we had different occasions to speak about my research. As soon as she sat down, and before the interview started, she told me that the night before our interview, her 6-year-old daughter had an emotional meltdown at the prospect that Donald Trump was going to be the next President of the United States. In the run-up to the elections, Jen – who is a supporter of the Democratic Party – had discussed the situation with her children, and her eldest had become particularly involved and interested in the process. ‘She was heartbroken when I told her that Trump was probably going to win, so she started to cry’ said Jen. She also told me that she felt so proud about her daughters’ political awareness that she decided to film the meltdown. Jen wanted to post the video on Facebook, because ‘it was too cute’. However, she decided against posting it because her husband Carlos – who was very aware of the impact of predictive analytics – told her that her video would create an important political trace for her daughter, a trace that could define her in the future.

Jen and Carlos were not the only parents that I interviewed who were actively negotiating and making sense of how the datafication of childhood could be impacting on the making of children as citizen subjects. Different parents that I have spoken to, in both London and Los Angeles, seemed to believe that data traces, and especially social media traces, spoke for and about their family life and the life of their children in ways that – although at times inaccurate – could lead to specific conclusions about their children’s political, social, and civic life.

One question that I asked parents during the interviews was how they would be able to ‘profile’ their children on the basis of the information that they posted on social media. Flickering through their screens, many parents acknowledged that – with the information that they posted on social media – people and machines alike would reach some key details about (1) the family’s political history, (2) the family’s social class, (3) the health of children, (4) gender, and (5) general interests. For instance, when I asked Louise what conclusions about her family life people would reach on the basis of the information that she posted on social media, she answered,

They would work out that we leave in Lewisham that we are teachers that we don’t think much of the Tory government, that we like Heidi who is our MP that we are involved in the local church. They would know all our interests.

As we have seen above, Louise was very conscious and careful about the data she posted, and she was aware of the impacts that data traces could have on her children’s public life. What the experiences of Louise, Carlos, and Jen reveal is that parents are critically reflecting on the datafication of citizens, and in doing so, they are questioning the impact of data and automated decision making on their children’s future lives. This latter point emerged well in an interview with Zack, a father of two girls who lived in a big council estate in South London:

Z: [My Children] will have to deal with a world that will be different from ours, with an over controlling state, there might be very important information out there like genetic maps. So, say for instance if my daughter was genetically predisposed to melanoma, and that information were to be out there, then she might have to pay a much higher health insurance if she needed a private doctor …

V: do you think there is anything that you can do to protect them?

Z: Well at first, they have to gain awareness that their data is being collected, and they should learn to be more selective with the personal data that they share and the cost that data may have on their lives.

Although Zack believed that it was crucial for his daughters to become more aware of the data environments that they were living in, he also felt powerless and believed that the situation was going to escape their control. Also Jen, like Zack, was daunted by the scale of the datafication of citizens and its impacts on the future:

J: I was telling Carlos the other day that we are going to be like in The Matrix (film, 1999) that we are going to be controlled by all these algorithms, and you will think that you have choices, but you don’t. You go on Google and you have all these advertisers, and so I was telling Carlos, why can’t we be Neo, why can’t we break out of The Matrix? You know the thing is that we see it. We know that they are collecting our information, but we can’t stop ourselves from participating to this. Like you are so dependent on this. So, I kept asking my husband why we couldn’t break out of the Matrix and he answered ‘because we are not Neo’ …

Conclusion

We are living at an historical time when personal data are constantly gathered by a variety of consumer and non-consumer platforms to make key and automated decisions about one’s life. In this context, data talks for and about a citizen’s life; it is understood as a definer of ones’ identity, of one’s psychological predisposition, and of one’s self-value. This article has argued that in order to understand this techno-historical transformation, we need to critically reflect on the emergence of the datafied citizen and explore how digital participation is increasingly becoming coerced. Today, we are not only digital citizens who choose to use Internet technologies to perform our public selves or enact specific rights, we are all becoming datafied citizens because our personal data are constantly collected and made to act for us by others. Data define us as public subjects and determine our civic rights.

When we think about the rise of the datafied citizen, however, we need to avoid the understanding of the datafied citizen as an objective and quantifiable subject. This essentialist image of the datafied citizen that is present in debates about data and governance (e.g. China and the social credit score) is not a reality yet, and focusing on it overshadows the messiness and human dimension of data governance. In order to understand the emergence of the datafied citizen, instead, we have much to gain if we focus on process, on the multiple ways in which individuals are being turned into datafied citizens, on the policies and political economic structures that make this datafication possible, and on the lived experience of this techno-historical transformation.

One way in which we can focus on process and lived experience is to look at children. As this article has shown, the children of today are the very first generation of citizens who are being datafied from before they are born, in ways that were not possible before. Highlighting the lived experience of these processes of datafication, I believe, is of central importance, because it shows that the datafication of citizens is being negotiated piece by piece in everyday life. These processes of negotiation can shed light on the democratic challenges of the data environments that we are living and on their implications for the future.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author biography

Veronica Barassi is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths University of London and the convenor of the BA Anthropology and Media Degree. She is one of the founders of the Goldsmiths Media Ethnography Group and the Chair of the E-Seminars of the Media Anthropology Network of the European Association of Social Anthropology. She is the principal Investigator on the Child | Data | Citizen Project (funded by the British Academy) and was the principal investigator on the ‘Social Movements and Media Technologies: Present Challenges and Future Developments’ Seminar series’ (funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, UK 2015–2017). She is the author of Activism on the Web: Everyday Struggles against Digital Capitalism (Routledge, 2015), and her work on digital participation, datafication, and citizenship has been published by top-ranked academic journals.

References

Andrejevic

(2013) Infoglut: How Too Much Information Is Changing the Way We Think and Know. New York: Routledge.

Barassi

(2016) Datafied citizens? Social media activism, digital traces and the question about political profiling. Communication and the Public 1: 494–499.

Barassi

(2017) BabyVeillance? Expecting parents, online surveillance and the cultural specificity of pregnancy apps. Social Media + Society 3(2). Available at: https://journals-sagepub-com-s.web.bisu.edu.cn/doi/full/10.1177/2056305117707188

Barassi

(2018a) Home Life Data and Children’s Privacy (Call for Evidence Submission Information Commissioner’s Office). London: Goldsmiths University of London.

Barassi

(2018b) The child as datafied citizen: Critical questions on data justice in family life. In: Mascheroni

Ponte

Jorge

(eds) Digital Parenting: The Challenges for Families in the Digital Age. Göteborg: NORDICOM, pp. 169–177.

Bellamy-Foster

McChesney

(2014). Monthly review surveillance capitalism, 1 July. Available at: https://monthlyreview.org/2014/07/01/surveillance-capitalism/ (accessed 22 August 2018).

Cheney-Lippold

(2017) We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves. New York: New York University Press.

Clarke

(1988) Information technology and dataveillance. Communications of the ACM 31(5): 498–512.

Coady

(2009) Being and becomings: Historical and philosophical considerations of the child as citizen. In: Naughton

Hughes

Smith

(eds) Young Children as Active Citizens: Principles, Policies and Pedagogies. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 3–16.

10.

Couldry

Powell

(2014) Big data from the bottom up. Big Data & Society. Available at: https://journals-sagepub-com-s.web.bisu.edu.cn/doi/pdf/10.1177/2053951714539277

11.

Draper

Turow

(2019) The corporate cultivation of digital resignation. New Media & Society. Epub ahead of print 8 March. DOI: 10.1177/1461444819833331.

12.

Earls

(2011) The Child as Citizen. Thousand Oaks: SAGE.

13.

Elmer

(2004) Profiling Machines: Mapping the Personal Information Economy. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

14.

Eubanks

(2018) Automating Inequality: How High-tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

15.

Federal Trade Commission (FTC) (2014) Data Brokers: A Call for Transparency and Accountability. Available at: https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/reports/data-brokers-call-transparency-accountability-report-federal-trade-commission-may-2014/140527databrokerreport.pdf

16.

Gangadharan

(2012) Digital inclusion and data profiling. First Monday 17(5). Available at: http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3821

17.

Hargittai

Marwick

(2016) ‘What can I really do?’ Explaining the privacy paradox with online apathy. International Journal of Communication 10: 21.

18.

Hildebrandt

Gutwirth

(2008) Profiling the European Citizen: Cross-disciplinary Perspectives. New York: Springer.

19.

Hintz

Dencik

Wahl-Jorgensen

(2017) Digital citizenship and surveillance digital citizenship and surveillance society – Introduction. International Journal of Communication 11: 9.

20.

Hintz

Dencik

Wahl-Jorgensen

(2018) Digital Citizenship in a Datafied Society. London: Polity Press.

21.

Kelty

Panofsky

Currie

, et al. (2015) Seven dimensions of contemporary participation disentangled. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 66(3): 474–488.

22.

Kitchin

(2014) The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and their Consequences. 1st ed. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE.

23.

Leaver

(2017) Intimate surveillance: Normalizing parental monitoring and mediation of infants online. Social Media + Society 3(2). Available at: https://journals-sagepub-com-s.web.bisu.edu.cn/doi/10.1177/2056305117707192

24.

Lekakis

(2013) Coffee Activism and the Politics of Fair Trade and Ethical Consumption in the Global North: Political Consumerism and Cultural Citizenship. New York: Springer.

25.

Livingstone

Sefton-Green

(2016) The Class: Living and Learning in the Digital Age. New York: NYU Press.

26.

Livingstone

Third

(2018) Children: A special case for privacy? Intermedia 46: 18–23.

27.

Lupton

Thomas

(2015) Playing Pregnancy: The Ludification and Gamification of Expectant Motherhood in Smartphone Apps. M/C Journal 18(5).

28.

Lupton

Williamson

(2017) The datafied child: The dataveillance of children and implications for their rights. New Media & Society 19(5): 780–794. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816686328

29.

Lyon

(2014) Surveillance, Snowden, and big data: Capacities, consequences, critique. Big Data & Society 1(2): 1–13.

30.

Manovich

(2011) Trending: The promises and challenges of big social data. In: Gold (ed.) Debates in the Digital Humanities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 460–475.

31.

Mayer-Schonberger

Cukier

(2013) Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think. London: John Murray.

32.

Milakovich

(2012) Digital Governance: New Technologies for Improving Public Service and Participation. New York: Routledge.

33.

Nissenbaum

(2009) Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

34.

Nolas

S-M

Varvantakis

Aruldoss

(2016) (Im)possible conversations? Activism, childhood and everyday life. Journal of Social and Political Psychology 4(1): 252–265.

35.

Pasquale

(2015) The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information. Reprint ed. Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press.

36.

Pink

Lanzeni

Horst

(2018) Data anxieties: Finding trust in everyday digital mess. Big Data & Society 5(1). Available at: https://journals-sagepub-com-s.web.bisu.edu.cn/doi/full/10.1177/2053951718756685

37.

Solove

(2004) The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age. New York: New York University Press.

38.

Taylor

(2017) What is data justice? The case for connecting digital rights and freedoms globally. Big Data & Society 4(2). Available at: https://journals-sagepub-com-s.web.bisu.edu.cn/doi/full/10.1177/2053951717736335

39.

Turow

Hennessy

Draper

(2015) The Tradeoff Fallacy: How Marketers Are Misrepresenting American Consumers and Opening Them Up to Exploitation. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network.

40.

Williamson

(2017) Big Data in Education: The digital future of learning, policy and practice. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

41.

Zuboff

(2015) Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization (SSRN Scholarly Paper No. ID 2594754). Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network.

42.

Zuboff

(2019) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. 1st ed. New York: Public Affairs.