Children’s Privacy in Lockdown: Intersections between Privacy, Participation and Protection Rights in a Pandemic (original) (raw)
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(opening paragraphs) In a sense, to be a child is to be under surveillance. Parents watch their children to keep them safe and to correct their behaviour. Teachers keep an eye on students to enforce classroom rules and to maintain discipline. Managers of shopping malls and many other semi-public places use a variety of methods to keep young people under control in order to maintain those spaces for adult usage, sensibilities and consumption. Depending on age, which is critical in this context, it can be argued that surveillance as care is a necessary condition of nurturing and educating children and young people. However there are a series of pressing questions about the surveillance of young people. To what extent is surveillance justified? How far should it go and what form should it take? Is it more about imposing (adult) order of some kind on young people rather than a form of care? Is it a means of reproducing adult society in perpetuity at the expense of the alterity that might flourish in young life and which might challenge dominant ideologies and orders of society? How does it square with children’s rights? Such questions have long been at the heart of relations between young people and adults, and arepressing in new ways particularly in relationship to technology, capitalism, urbanism and consumption. link to the special issue http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/ojs/index.php/journal/issue/view/Childhood
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in R. Leenes/D. Hallinan/S. Gutwirth/P. De Hert (eds.), Privacy and Data Protection: Data Protection and Democracy, Hart Publishing (Oxford) 2020. *** When speaking of children’ s activities on the internet, the public focus has so far mostly been on online risks. However, the internet plays a paramount positive role in enhancing children’s participation in society and fulfilling their rights. Despite the pivotal relevance the digital environment has for children and the difficult balance between protection and participation components in an online setting, such topics have long been neglected. Finally, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has sparked an imperative public discussion on this issue. Against this background, the goal of this chapter is to highlight the new pathways opened by the regulation to concretely support the achievement of children’s rights in the digital environment. Despite lacking involvement from experts and children in its drafting and the reprehensible age requirement to give consent to data processing, the regulation does provide important normative tools to empower children online. To this end, its practical implementation – which needs to go beyond a merely legal approach – will be decisive. This chapter follows a multi-stakeholder approach, taking into account the different actors playing an important role in this regard, such as families, educational actors and civil society, business, public authorities, academia and research institutes. The author particularly advocates a stronger evidence-based cooperation among these actors and offers a few practical suggestions to achieve this.