[Tech Today Bro] Call for smart home devices to bake in privacy safeguard for kids
Channel: TECH TODAY BRO!
Date: 2018-09-19

A new research report has raised concerns about how in-home smart devices such as AI virtual voice assistants, smart appliances, and security and monitoring technologies could be gathering and sharing children’s data.

It calls for new privacy measures to safeguard kids and make sure age appropriate design code is included with home automation technologies.

The report, entitled Home Life Data and Children’s Privacy, is the work of Dr Veronica Barassi of Goldsmiths, University of London, who leads a research project at the university investigating the impact of big data and AI on family life.

Barassi wants the UK’s data protection agency to launch a review of what she terms “home life data” — meaning the information harvested by smart in-home devices that can end up messily mixing adult data with kids’ information — to consider its impact on children’s privacy, and “put this concept at the heart of future debates about children’s data protection”.

“Debates about the privacy implications of AI home assistants and Internet of Things focus a lot on the the collection and use of personal data. Yet these debates lack a nuanced understanding of the different data flows that emerge from everyday digital practices and interactions in the home and that include the data of children,” she writes in the report.

“When we think about home automation therefore, we need to recognise that much of the data that is being collected by home automation technologies is not only personal (individual) data but home life data… and we need to critically consider the multiple ways in which children’s data traces become intertwined with adult profiles.”

The report gives examples of multi-user functions and aggregated profiles (such as Amazon’s Household Profiles feature) as constituting a potential privacy risk for children’s privacy.

Another example cited is biometric data — a type of information frequently gathered by in-home ‘smart’ technologies (such as via voice or facial recognition tech) yet the report asserts that generic privacy policies often do not differentiate between adults’ and children’s biometric data. So that’s another grey area being critically flagged by Barassi.

She’s submitted the report to the ICO in response to its call for evidence and views on an Age Appropriate Design Code it will be drafting. This code is a component of the UK’s new data protection legislation intended to support and supplement rules on the handling of children’s data contained within pan-EU privacy regulation — by providing additional guidance on design standards for online information services that process personal data and are “likely to be accessed by children”.

And it’s very clear that devices like smart speakers intended to be installed in homes where families live are very likely to be accessed by children.

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