Sharenthood • Sharenthood 3. Beyond Narnia: More Problems Await through the Wardrobe Leah A. Plunkett Published on: Aug 26, 2019 Sharenthood • Sharenthood 3. Beyond Narnia: More Problems Await through the Wardrobe 2 Sharenthood • Sharenthood 3. Beyond Narnia: More Problems Await through the Wardrobe space. It can silently take pieces of information from children and their adults, mine them for more information, and reshare that information with an unknown number of others for unspecified ends. At this point, what is your intuition? Do the bad actors—the identity thieves and others—seem risky enough to lead you to think differently about sharenting? Or are you inclined to see the threat they pose as more avalanche (terrifying but rare) than snowstorm (dangerous but manageable)? How does your risk assessment change, if at all, if you think more about the snowstorm scenario than the avalanche? If you live in an area with winter weather, at some point, you probably will drive in a snowstorm. And if you engage in sharenting, private information about your children will go through the big data blizzard. Time to hit the brakes? Magic Wardrobe2 Let’s say that the identity thief is like the stereotypical burglar who breaks into your house and takes your stuff: you’re left without your possessions and harmed by this loss. The big data thief could be seen as more akin to a customer at a yard sale who buys the old bureau you inherited from your grandmother that you think is worthless, discovers a treasure trove of family photos and other heirlooms inside, and keeps the stash for herself. That’s a helpful but incomplete analogy. Let’s look at where it works. Big data isn’t stealing. You’re welcoming it. You might be rolling out the welcome mat to big data because you don’t realize it’s there. You might know it’s there but think it’s helping you. And perhaps it is helping you or at least not hurting you. Let’s look at where this analogy breaks down. In your interactions with digital tech and associated big data, you are typically deriving immediate benefits that go beyond the removal of an unwanted possession. To make the analogy more accurate, big data might be like the yard sale customer who gives you a new dresser for free and takes away your old one. The analogy also breaks down because big data doesn’t typically deprive you of the use of any of your own information that you generate yourself: it just uses it for its own purposes. To make the analogy even more accurate, our yard sale customer might leave you a duplicate set of everything she found in the dresser and then use the set she took for her own purposes. The analogy also breaks down because, in big data world, you are continually creating new data by engaging the digital tech. It’s not a finite set of valuables that you leave in the form of a data trail but an ever-growing set. And it’s an ever-growing set that wouldn’t exist but for the digital tech that you are using. Now we’re at the point with our analogy where the yard sale customer takes away your old dresser and gives you a new one. For as long as you have it, that new dresser continues to give you new benefits, 3 Sharenthood • Sharenthood 3. Beyond Narnia: More Problems Await through the Wardrobe like a sock matcher so you never lose any socks again. What’s so bad about your magic wardrobe? You’re starting to think you might actually find Narnia3 after all these years! Well, you might. But it might also be that, instead of a witch waiting for you on the other side of the wardrobe, the wardrobe itself is bewitched. It starts learning a lot of things about you and your family that you don’t even realize it is learning. Let’s say you’re using the magic wardrobe to house your daughter’s clothes.4 The wardrobe is perfectly matching her socks, but you don’t notice that it is making a copy of each sock. The wardrobe also selects your daughter’s outfit for each day and coordinates the socks with the outfit. How does the wardrobe know how to produce an outfit that is perfect for the day’s events? You gave the wardrobe permission, when it arrived, to communicate with your iPhone calendar via an embedded sensor in the back of the wardrobe. The sensor system is also linked to sensors in your daughter’s clothes, so the smart wardrobe combines what it learns from your iPhone calendar to tell you what your daughter should wear. Forget the Lion and the Witch: it’s like Mary Poppins has taken up residence in this wardrobe! You’re loving this helpful magic so much that you don’t think about what else the magic wardrobe is learning about your daughter. You don’t ask if it’s figuring out how she’s doing in school from your calendar entry that reads “Parent-teacher conference re: bullying issue @ 2 p.m.” You don’t think about whether it’s figuring out how fast she’s growing from reading her clothing tags. You don’t wonder if it’s keeping its discoveries to itself. Your daughter looks awesome, and you have five to ten minutes more each morning to Instagram her #girlpower pics. What you’re actually doing with your children’s data in real life is a lot like this magical wardrobe. In exchange for free or inexpensive access to efficient, engaging, interactive digital services and products, you are sharing an ever-expanding amount of your children’s personal information with those tech providers. You likely don’t realize how much data you are sharing or how that tech provider can use your children’s information and allow an indeterminate number of unidentifiable third parties to use it too. We don’t need make-believe to find ourselves in a veritable Fantasia of spying objects. Out of Narnia, Back to Real Life Let’s move from make-believe enchanted objects to the real-life enchanted objects and other forms of digital tech you’re likely using today. Facebook can add your post about toilet training dilemmas as a data point to its own information about you, as well as whatever information it is sharing with third parties. Barbie, Elmo, new nanny: it’s all data. The question isn’t “Who might be interested in this kind of dossier on kids?” but “Who wouldn’t be?” 4 Sharenthood • Sharenthood 3. Beyond Narnia: More Problems Await through the Wardrobe Is this stuff happening already? Yes, it is. We are only beginning to understand the methods and the scope. The rapid pace of tech innovation, the lack of transparency in many major data-related markets, and other factors combine to keep us, as security expert Bruce Schneier tells it, the David to the Goliath of big data.5 Here’s what we do know. Federal and state laws impose almost no limits on the ability of parents to share information about their kids online.6 As soon as private individuals, companies, or nonprofits receive this information from parents, there are few legal limits on what they can do with it. Those limits that do exist come from general bodies of law or laws that apply to the receiving people or entities, not specific statutory and regulatory schemes that address parents’ legal rights to divulge their children’s private information. Some significant limits include those from criminal law. Parents can’t steal their children’s identities, manufacture child porn, or commit other crimes against or involving their children. Consumer law and contract law require companies to follow their own terms of service and policies, best-practice commitments, and other commitments they make regarding how they will use children’s data. A federal statute, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, does limit what many private companies can do to collect and use information directly from children under age thirteen. The limit? The covered companies need to have a parent’s permission before collecting and using the data.7 Similar legal limits exist for teachers: they need to obtain parental consent before sharing students’ private data, unless an exception applies.8 There are government actors and institutions outside of education where parental consent is not dispositive. For instance, a juvenile court may be legally barred from sharing information about a child’s court case even with parental permission. But we now find ourselves back more or less where we started: parents stand at the center of a largely consent-based framework for the digital distribution and use of their children’s private data. After they have consented to digital data sharing about their kids, either by doing it themselves or allowing other adults and institutions to do it, the data can travel at warp speed across entities and time.9 Data Brokers Data brokers facilitate this movement by aggregating and analyzing digital data. Brokers then sell this data to third parties. Data buyers then use discrete data points or larger data sets to engage in data- driven decision making for their own purposes.10 Private companies that collect, store, and share relevant data with individuals and institutions that are willing to pay are not a new idea. Holdovers 5 Sharenthood • Sharenthood 3. Beyond Narnia: More Problems Await through the Wardrobe from last century include the consumer credit bureaus, real estate brokers, and employment headhunters.