Presentation 1
FINANCE APPS AND THE DATAFICATION OF CHILDREN’S ECONOMIC LIVES
Bjørn Nansen, Lauren Bliss
University of Melbourne, Australia
Children’s finances are increasingly datafied through the emergence and development of applications for managing chores, saving, and spending. These finance apps incorporate features for both parents and children, enabling the setting and tracking of chores, the payment of allowances or pocket money, as well as supporting and managing children’s saving and spending habits.
The paper draws on and contributes to children’s financial socialisation and digital platform studies. This paper offers a novel contribution to these fields, applying the concept of datafication to children’s financial lives through a feature analysis of children’s finance apps. The feature analysis reviews information in Appstore descriptions, company websites, and product reviews to identify and map the range of features spread across these apps.
Our analysis considers three emergent themes in which these apps are significantly impacting children’s financial lives: management of child household labour; mediation of children’s financial agency; and datafication of children’s economic participation.
We argue that the data produced by child finance apps simultaneously enables increased agency and control of children’s financial lives by initiating a lifelong digital trace.
Presentation 2
FAMILY PRIVACY, FAMILY AUTONOMY AND COERCION IN DIGITAL HEALTHCARE
Claire Bessant
Northumbria University, United Kingdom
This paper use family privacy theory and the dataveillance literature as lenses through which to explore state use of health technologies in the care of unwell children, and the contribution of such technologies to children’s datafication.
Family privacy is an important ideology which informs legal and political understandings of the family, and influences laws governing the family’s relationship with state and society. Respect for family privacy is commonly understood to entail state non-intervention in ordinary family life. Increasingly, however, scholars recognise that family privacy may be more widely understand to entail family autonomy or decision-making. It is also now recognised that family privacy plays an important role in protecting families from societal and corporate intrusion and can further be understood to afford parental control over how family information, particularly children’s information, is used.
This paper explores important questions about whether parents and children should be expected to engage with healthcare technologies which they may not understand or trust, and which parents may not perceive to be in their children’s best interests. Arguing that professionals should support parents and children to understand these technologies and the implications not just for children’s health but also for their privacy, it uses the UK General Data Protection Regulation as a framework for exploring what transparent, lawful and fair use of children’s data entails in the context of digitised healthcare. It suggests how professionals keen to use digital technologies to support children’s healthcare can afford due respect both to parental autonomy and to children’s privacy.
Presentation 3
GEOTRACKING FOR CONVENIENCE: EXPLORING THE VIEWS AND EXPERIENCES RELATED TO THE USE OF TRACKING TECHNOLOGIES IN PARENT-ADULT CHILD PAIRS
Andra Siibak, Kelli Aia
University of Tartu, Estonia
Other-tracking apps (Gabriels, 2016), have increasingly gained popularity among parents (Burnell et al. 2023, Mavova et al. 2023), however, most of the empirical studies on the topic so far have focused on exploring the use of tracking technologies within families where children are still minors.
A qualitative interview study in families where parents use tracking technologies to track their young adults (18-26 year olds) (n=10) was conducted for exploring both parents' and children's views and experiences on the topic. Furthermore, inspired by the communication privacy management theory (Petronio 2002) we aimed to capture the potential role such tracking may have on the sense of privacy and parent–child relations.
Findings suggest that the use of tracking technologies is rationalized and supported both by parents and their adult children as a practice making caring dataveillance (Lupton, 2020) possible. On several occasions it was the adult children who had initiated such intimate surveillance as they considered tracking to be less intrusive and annoying than constant phone calls and messages from parents. For many, tracking technologies were seen as convenience tools, enabling to provide instant information about the whereabouts of family members and therefore often used for planning family logistics, or organizing day-to-day errands (e.g. cooking). Even though parents sometimes used the devices as disciplinary technologies (e.g. reminding the child of the need to wake up and to attend their lecture), such intrusions were welcomed by young adults. Thus, our analysis suggests that such caring dataveillance could act as a trigger for irresponsibility.
Presentation 4
DNA DATA: DIGITAL DISPLAYS OF FAMILY AND THE BIO-DIGITAL SELF
Giselle Newton
University of Queensland, Australia
The family genealogy industry has seen exponential growth in recent years, in large part due to the rise of direct-to-consumer DNA testing platforms. To some extent, ancestry-oriented DNA platforms function like other social media networks, connecting users in intimate publics. Yet they differ in that rather than ordering users by social relationships such as friendship, individuals are displayed according to how many centimorgans they share. In recent years, digital researchers have extended the sociological concept of ‘family display’ to consider digital displays of family. Yet limited work has considered how DNA platforms may constitute digital displays of family or how DNA data shape the bio-digital identities for affected communities who have limited avenues to familial information. In this presentation, I draw on data from the first empirical study to capture the Australian direct-to-consumer DNA users’ experiences, combining accounts from genealogy enthusiasts with accounts from those affected by adoption and donor conception. Reflexive thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews (n=25) derived two key themes: (1) DNA displays of family - how users are connected and ordered on the DNA platform, and (2) Defining the bio-digital self - how identity is shaped by DNA data. This work firstly contributes to understanding digital displays of family, specifically how DNA platforms shape understandings and practices of family. Secondly, this work provides insights into how DNA data (like other biometric data) shape individual identities in complex ways.
