Week 9: Babies can be smarter than you think
Where there are consumer products, there is data to be collected. It seems that no object can escape the destiny of becoming “smart”ified and connected to the Internet. It began with smart phones and has since moved on to smart TVs, smart watches and smart meters. No item is too mundane to be upgraded in this way – we have now entered the era of the smart nappy. The smart nappy is part of a recent proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, where everyday objects are connected to the Internet and can collect data. Pampers has developed a “smart” nappy system known as Lumi, which uses an activity sensor attached to nappies that detect when they are wet and track babies’ sleep (Pampers). The system can also follow babies’ routines, development and “nudge” parents to “to better take care of their children” (Financial Times).
Who benefits from this datafication of human activity? It is probably not the child who grows up and, in later life, has the ability to make a data subject access request to review their nappy data. It is questionable whether anxious parents gain by buying into yet another baby product with dubious benefit, given that all the smart nappy does is amount to a “truly brilliant update to the obsolete technology known as “your nose”” (The Guardian). Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, president of the International Society for Infant Studies, has suggested that the smart nappy could make babies less self-reliant as they do not need to learn how to communicate when their nappy is full (CNN). Additionally, there is even a change.org petition suggesting the nappies are not safe and potentially carcinogenic (Change.org).
It is not particularly surprising that the product was developed by Pampers in partnership with Verily – a sister company to Google. For Google’s parent, Alphabet, smart nappies can facilitate a truly cradle to grave relationship with consumers. Although it seems that only parents will be able to access the data, aggregate data will be used to “improve the product”. The exact purposes of collection and who will be able to access it are not yet clear, though Google does not have an excellent reputation for being transparent about its data collection practices. Until a leak exposed it, they did not disclose that human reviewers had been listening to conversations recorded by its Google smart speakers (The Guardian).
A further concern is that IoT devices have a relatively weak security profile and are more vulnerable to hacking (Walport). Perhaps the nappy data could be considered innocuous. However, parents do not normally advertise this information to friends and neighbours – so why should they feel comfortable with the risk of hackers accessing it? Additionally, the account information connected to the smart nappy is also expected to include the baby’s name, sex and date of birth, which is data that presumably parents do care about and do not want hackers to access.
Ultimately, these concerns do not seem to have deterred anxious parents – there is a waiting list to purchase Lumi.
