Digital handcuffs or electronic nannies: Children, privacy and emerging surveillance technologies

  Convergence of parental anxieties, commercial opportunism and advances in network technologies is providing the basis for unprecedented surveillance of children and young people. Those technologies extend from automated monitoring of SMS/MMS on mobiles used by minors and mobile-based geolocation tools that allow parental monitoring of the movement of young people to proposals for ‘tagging’ children (or those experiencing a second childhood) with subdermal identity/tracking chips. The technologies have been promoted as an electronic nanny or as appropriate responses to predation and risk along the digital frontier. They have been damned as digital handcuffs that erode the autonomy of young people, are readily subverted and, more seriously, are open to abuse by people outside the family. The paper offers an introduction to current and foreshadowed technologies, looking beyond a debate that has centred on surveillance of desktop-based web-browsing and mandatory filtering of internet content. It explores the interaction of regulation, economics and demand, given that technologies are not situated within a legal or commercial vacuum. It assesses the status of those technologies under existing Australian law. In highlighting particular concerns the paper draws on research from Australia and overseas regarding risk, use/misuse of surveillance tools and legal responses to privacy challenges at the level of principle and practice. This paper was presented at paper at the \u27Watch This Space children & privacy conference\u27 in Melbourne, May 2010, organised by Privacy Victoria. Image: P i c t u r e Y o u t h / Flick