Child Data Citizen: How Tech Companies Are Profiling Us from Before Birth

An examination of the datafication of family life--in particular, the construction of our children into data subjects.

Our families are being turned into data, as the digital traces we leave are shared, sold, and commodified. Children are datafied even before birth, with pregnancy apps and social media postings, and then tracked through babyhood with learning apps, smart home devices, and medical records. If we want to understand the emergence of the datafied citizen, Veronica Barassi argues, we should look at the first generation of datafied natives: our children. In Child Data Citizen, she examines the construction of children into data subjects, describing how their personal information is collected, archived, sold, and aggregated into unique profiles that can follow them across a lifetime.

Veronica Barassi is a Professor in Media and Communications at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. She is the author of Activism on the Web: Everyday Struggles against Digital Capitalism.