Smartphones facilitate the way we communicate and help us stay connected with friends and family. Yet, they also have a feature that allows for easier tracking and profiling, which is used for advertising and many other purposes. Companies try to extract as much data as possible from users to offer the most relevant advertisements at the right time — which may explain why people sometimes have the feeling their phones are eavesdropping on them.
In contrast to other devices, smartphones allow the collection of a significant amount of data as they are always connected to a network. Unlike PCs, smartphones have GPS services that can locate a user with great precision. Also, we tend to share our life in videos and photos on social media using our smartphones, which can be analyzed by machine learning. Lastly, user data is continuously tracked as long as an application is running in the background. The data collected about one user from different sources is then accumulated under a user identifier.
This type of surveillance can have some implications for children. However, due to their naive nature, younger children may not understand the extent to which surveillance affects their life negatively as an adult. For example, it was found that legal surveillance causes anxiety and reduces autonomy. In a different scenario, one child’s social presence, stored in his or her profile, can be used against that person in adulthood when applying for a job or borrowing money.
As a parent or carer you can do a few things to protect your child from being excessively surveilled via their smartphones.
- Study the privacy settings of downloaded apps and deny unnecessary permissions
- Use throwaway emails for children’s accounts and use pseudonyms instead of a real name
- Disable location services or if you use location, explain to your child how the data can be used
- Install an ad-block
You can make your child happier and more digitally conscientious by explaining how apps store data that can be used against them.
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