Datafied families and parental surveillance by default? Exploring parental care and surveillance in the construction of smart home technology

Abstract

Technological opportunities for parental surveillance are booming (Sukk & Siibak, 2021). In the literature, much focus is placed on tracking technologies (e.g., Widmer & Albrechtslund, 2021), wearables (e.g., Mascheroni & Holloway, 2019; Wang et al., 2017), and pregnancy apps (e.g., Lupton, 2020). Novel smart home devices such as smart cameras, doorbells, baby monitors and speakers also enable surveillance practices in the private sphere of households (e.g., Beneteau et al., 2020; Dereymaeker et al., 2023). However, research on their use for parental surveillance remains limited. Parental surveillance is often coined as a ‘caring’ practice (e.g., Leaver, 2017; Stark & Levy, 2018), which should come as no surprise considering common discourses on vulnerable children and the ongoing commodification of monitoring technologies. Parental surveillance, we argue, can be understood in light of Beck’s (1992) risk society, wherein risk has become central in today’s world (Ericson & Haggerty, 2006). Technology companies (e.g. developing child tracking technologies) commercialise the notion of risk, drawing from anxieties over societal problems like ‘stranger danger’, to increase sales, thereby representing parental surveillance as a caring parental choice (Lupton et al., 2016; Marx & Steeves, 2010; Simpson, 2014; Stark & Levy, 2018). To date, it remains unclear if this logic of care applies to smart home technologies. Building on Science and Technology Studies and specifically the social construction of technology, we argue that smart home technologies are designed with socio-cultural norms on risk, parenthood, childhood and ‘appropriate parental surveillance’ in mind. With the aim of understanding how these norms seep into the construction of smart home technologies, we are in the process of conducting a corporate ethnography1 within a Belgian smart home company and explore whether and how notions of parental care and surveillance inform the development of smart home technologies.