Smart toys and children’s understanding of personal data

Abstract

The proliferation of smart toys has led to an increase in young children’s exposure to technologies that ask for their personal data, thus creating privacy concerns and efforts to minimise the exploitation of children’s data. Research that addresses the ways in which young children (below the age of five or six) could come to understand a concept as abstract as ‘personal data’ is scarce but this is fundamental to the approach presented here. The paper makes three main contributions: (i) a discussion of what we mean by children’s understanding of personal data from smart toys, (ii) a theoretical account of approaches for supporting children’s understanding of data based on developmental and child interaction design literature and, building on this foundation, (iii) a description of a previously unreported prototype smart toy – Edi the Bear – along with a small-scale pilot study to explore the extent to which the toy can support children’s understanding of personal data. Preliminary findings suggest that revealing the mechanisms by which personal data is collected can help children to develop their capacity to understand that their data has value as it can be used by unknown others to learn about who they are. We describe the main functionality of the prototype and consider the ways in which it could be used by educators to communicate concepts of personal data in a way that is meaningful to young children.