Intimate Surveillance: Normalizing Parental Monitoring and Mediation of Infants Online

Whitaker (2000) argues that in the information age, we all are part of a “participatory Panopticon” in which we choose to engage and allow many forms of surveillance because the benefits are obvious and clear, but the cost of participation is often hidden. This contrast is even clearer in contemporary digital communication where the immediacy and community of social media, the convenience of electronic commerce, and the safety afforded by both physical and digital surveillance often mask the price for this participation which include digital trails and profiles that can be owned, analyzed, and manipulated by corporate entities, through to more abstract profiling and modeling that transforms every digital interaction into a small part of a much larger “big data” picture of individuals, groups, and societies. Moreover, these profiles are only visible and exploitable to those aggregating the data behind the screen. While the creation and aggregation of data as an amalgam of the surveyed subject has long been part of surveillance practices, the sheer magnitude of surveillance today, both online and offline, has squarely situated surveillance in the realm of big data analytics (Lyon, 2001, 2014). As Lyon (2014, p. 11) notes, the revelations of widespread government-level data surveillance by whistleblower Edward Snowden “have done good service in showing how far state-based surveillance extends but also how much it depends on Big Data practices that implicate corporate bodies and connect directly with everyday practices of ordinary internet and cellphone users.” While surveillance may not be monolithic and inescapable, it is clearly woven into almost every element of an online and digital society.

As José van Dijck (2014) has noted, contemporary surveillance practices are predicated on a prevailing datafication taking place wherein all social activity is being tracked and digitized, becoming much sought after big data. Necessarily linked to datafication is the dominance of

Earlier surveillance scholarship characterized dataveillance as a subset of physical surveillance, built on more specific and focused targets (Clarke, 1988). However, the breadth of current surveillance ambitions, such as identifying potential terrorist communication among all personal electronic communication, is so wide that it can be used to justify capturing almost any personal information, communication, or media. Dataveillance is thus about the ongoing capture of data which can be later scrutinized as the tools and approaches for analysis often mature after big data are collected, rather than specifically justifying the capture in the first place.

Datafication and dataveillance also underpin the massive expansion of digital health platforms, apps, wearables, and related devices which, in addition, are driven by commodification, or the need to extract value and a meaningful business model from the big data collected (van Dijck & Poell, 2016). Typical health apps and platforms often involve two types of commodities: first, the app, monitor, wearable, or device which is sold initially to individual customers, and, second, insights and analytics produced from the aggregated and analyzed data generated by the customers using these devices. While questions of ownership of data are often very unclear, it is nevertheless the case that most health apps and platforms are for-profit companies and their larger long-term commodity is the aggregated big data and related insights, not the individual-level consumer products and apps (van Dijck & Poell, 2016).

Another recent shift has been toward what Andrejevic (2007, p. 223) calls “lateral surveillance, or peer-to-peer monitoring” which involves different forms of people surveying each other, from potential romantic partners searching for each other’s backgrounds online to family and friends monitoring each other, often utilizing technologies both mechanical, such as hidden cameras, and digital, including spyware and keystroke monitors. More to the point, peer surveillance has gone from being highly unusual to an accepted part of life in a digital culture. Andrejevic (2007) argues further that

Surveillance of one another is wrapped up with our social, economic, and domestic well-being.

In the context of peer and lateral surveillance, it is unsurprising that people experiencing pregnancy and new to parenthood are more and more drawn into a form of intimate surveillance as part of the way they actively care for their offspring. Intimate surveillance is defined as

This article builds on the emergence of intimate surveillance and extends the concept, arguing that these monitoring practices are being normalized in contemporary networked cultures. Following from Michel Foucault’s (1979, 1990) work, intimate surveillance is not applied or actioned through changes in the law, or other direct force, but becomes normalized through the often invisible disciplinary power of changes to accepted social and cultural practices. In selling and situating monitoring apps, infant wearables, and a host of other items and practices, the fetishization of monitoring and datafication are driven by affect far more so than just information and are thus a key element of the process of normalization.

The centrality of affect—the emotions, feelings, and sentiments present in situations and narratives—has become increasingly clear in recent studies of individuals and groups whose interactions have meaningful online dimensions. Affect is an important amplifier that can bring communities together and drive political change (Papacharissi, 2014). While affect enables, amplifies, and drives change, it is not inherently positive or negative, but can be either and anywhere in between. Indeed, Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign offers an example of affective campaigning, with highly charged emotional messages strategically overwhelming more factual or policy-based discussion. In Infoglut, Mark Andrejevic (2013, p. 139) warns of “communication in a post-referential era” in which the sheer amount of (conflicting) information available in networked communication leads to the heightening of affective impact, often overwhelming any connection with reliable meaning. In effect, emotional impact is more effective than the relationship with more recognizable forms of knowledge. Along similar lines, Jodi Dean (2010, pp. 3-4) has argued that affect is a core driver for what she describes as “communicative capitalism” in which “contemporary communications media capture their users in intensive and extensive networks of enjoyment, production, and surveillance.” Affective networks in which sentiment and emotion supersede other drivers seduce users into investing in utilizing, valuing, and sharing tools which encourage continual re-use for maximum reward. One example is online social networks wherein the value of the network comes from continued sharing and engagement. The design, operation, and continual changing of Facebook’s algorithms, for example, are attempting to continually produce affective encounters, where the sentiment or mood is heightened to encourage further interaction and engagement (Bucher, 2017). For Dean, the underlying exchange taking place, wherein the companies behind these platforms and apps derive value from the data generated through use of their platform, is deliberately obscured by the affective dimensions users enjoy.

In the sections below, I will argue that the combination of datafication, the centrality of affect, and intimate surveillance are normalizing the idea that digital surveillance of infants equates with care and good parenting. To situate that argument, I will briefly review the existing work which has looked at surveillance of the unborn, especially in terms of the explosion of pregnancy-related apps. Then I will focus on infancy using the examples of parental monitoring via infant wearables and parental mediation as made visible by the social media presence of micro-celebrity or influencer parents who discuss and share media about their children in very visible public forums.

Both the Google Play Store and iTunes Store feature hundreds of pregnancy-related apps, including a wide range of monitoring and tracking applications, some of which are interactive, share data, and some which directly connect to discussion forums and related spaces for conversation and sharing. While there are a wide range of different types of pregnancy apps, there are also some significant commonalities. As Lupton and Thomas (2015) argue, for example, a “dominant feature of pregnancy-related apps is the representation of the fetus as already a communicative person in its own right,” and in some apps which add gamified elements, this can involve virtual, but no less emotional, interactions with the unborn. Pregnancy apps, of course, are the most recent in a long line of technologies which visualize the unborn. As Lupton (2013, p. 35) notes, ultrasound technology and sonograms “have been a major contributor to the inexorable trend towards the individualising and infantilising of the unborn,” but it is also the case that this trend is magnified greatly in the era of networked sociality. Indeed, on popular social media apps such as Instagram, sharing pregnancy images publicly has become commonplace and can often reinforce a particularly narrow and normative notion of pregnancy and related practices (Tiidenberg & Baym, 2017). A study tracking the hashtag #ultrasound across 3 months in 2014 found that more than 11,000 media items were posted publicly on Instagram, and of the sonograms, more than 34% displayed personally identifiable information, such as the metadata shown on the screen during the ultrasound scans (Leaver & Highfield, 2016). Pregnancy apps and the sharing of pregnancy-related material on social media are thus elements of a much wider social sharing of prenatal information and media online.

Sophia Johnson has argued that pregnancy apps are part of a wider “‘device-ification’ of mothering,” which aligns with the processes of datafication, rendering pregnancy as “an administrative and calculable activity, valuing data over subjective experiences and changing the meaning of what it is to mother and be a mother” (Johnson, 2014, p. 346). Indeed, Johnson (2014) argues further that the visible use of apps, devices, and other tools which can be shared via social media can be situated as part of the “responsibilisation” of motherhood, in which access to greater information and data about pregnancy and the unborn simultaneously increases the expectation of specific ways of acting and self-policing the process of pregnancy and birth. This process is reinforced by the expectation of sharing information about prenatal experiences. As ultrasound photographs, baby showers, pregnancy selfies, and a host of other material are now routinely shared on social media, this either purposefully or inadvertently involves opinions and advice from a wider range of people, who directly or indirectly contribute to the “co-construction of prenatal life” (Seko & Tiidenberg, 2016, p. 57). Indeed, it is not just visual material, but often the outputs of various pregnancy apps which are routinely shared on social media. Designing these apps not just to record significant amounts of data but also to share this on social networks and elsewhere positions these tools as part of the “platformization of the web” (Helmond, 2015) wherein data flows are being shaped for the benefit of existing platforms as much as for individual users. What is clear is that pregnancy apps are part of a wider normalization of the sharing of prenatal images, media, stories, and data, across a range of bespoke and general social media platforms.

However, while the popularity of these apps is increasing seemingly exponentially, a recent study of popular pregnancy apps flagged a number of serious concerns about both the information provided by them and the treatment of the personal data they record (Bert, Passi, Scaioli, Gualano, & Siliquini, 2016). A detailed focus on the eight most popular pregnancy apps found data entered into the apps are shared with third-party companies for marketing purposes (with only a couple including a process to opt-out of this data sharing). Moreover, only three of the eight apps reviewed in detail included any mention of a scientific or medical board informing the information provided using the app. The study concluded that the information provided by pregnancy apps and the sources of this information need to be far more transparent, and the way data generated by users of the app are utilized also needs to be made much clearer. Along similar lines, a survey of 410 Australian women found that 73% had used a pregnancy app and of that group 92% found the apps helpful, 70% used the apps to monitor their fetus’ development, but only 21% of the group had checked where at least one of the apps they used had sourced its information (Lupton & Pedersen, 2016). In both these cases, the veracity of information provided by the apps and the use of information generated and recorded by users were unclear.

Beyond privacy issues relating to terms of use, the speed and culture in which pregnancy apps are built can also be problematic. In mid-2016, research revealed that the Glow pregnancy app had a number of very significant privacy issues and vulnerabilities that meant basic information could easily be accessed by third parties, including passwords. Excessive and unclear amounts of personal data were shared in related community forums, and “partner” sharing gave widespread access to the first person to request it, regardless of whether this access was authorized by the app’s user or not (Beilinson, 2016). The security issues were sufficient that it gained considerable media and online attention (e.g. Doctorow, 2016); these issues have subsequently been fixed, but the privacy issues with the Glow app are indicative of online startup culture in which the collecting, sharing, and owning of personal data are often prioritized over protecting and securing it, or necessarily providing sufficient privacy for users. Intimate surveillance thus begins with the maternal body. Pregnant women are both watched and viewed through, in order to monitor the unborn, and apps facilitating this monitoring often raise significant privacy issues as well as inherent questions about the veracity of the information they provide. With this context in mind, important questions thus frame any apps and devices pitched at parents of infants.

In 2016, Google was awarded a patent for a “Crib with Embedded Smart Sensors” (Veron, 2016), which includes a multitude of sensors, cameras, and even elements that are responsive to either an infant inside or a parent’s outside, connected device. While clearly still in development, Google’s interest in the world of infancy and smart sensors serves as a salient indicator that technology companies are increasingly looking at infancy and early childhood as growth areas for products and the associated generation of significant data about individuals in terms of health, sleep, activity, and so forth. Another clear indicator of the increase in online surveillance of infancy is the growth of Internet-enabled, responsive toys. In critiquing what they dub the “Internet of Toys,” Holloway and Green (2016) warn that toys that utilize Internet connections to provide personalized feedback and interaction often collate a significant amount of information about the child or children playing with that toy. That information is governed by often unclear Terms of Use which frequently state that the collected information can be utilized for any number of purposes after it is gathered. With that context in mind, this section focuses on one further rapidly growing area: infant wearables.

Infant wearables are monitoring devices which are worn on an infant’s body to quantify specific biological activities and states which are then wirelessly transmitted as data to central server. One of the most prominent infant wearables, primarily in the US market, is the Owlet which parents are encouraged to purchase and use from birth. Originally marketed as an “anklet” (Leaver, 2015a), the Owlet is now packaged as a “smart sock” for infants which contains health sensors that relay data via Bluetooth to a base station which in turn transmits this biometric information to the Owlet cloud servers that are accessed via apps on Apple or Android devices. Parents are encouraged to have infants wear the smart sock while sleeping and monitor the biometric information on their phones. On their website, the company promotes three key benefits of the Owlet:

Indeed, on their website’s homepage, the relatively sparse text manages to mention the expression “peace of mind” no less than five times, directly appealing to the affective intensity of early parenthood to sell these devices. An embedded video on the Owlet homepage of a CNBC story about the app adds another three uses of “peace of mind” (CNBC, 2016). Mentioned eight times on the home of the Owlet website alone, “peace of mind” is clearly the central sales strategy for the company. Yet while the website states the Owlet is “technology proven,” having recorded 100 billion heartbeats, it is important to note that the Owlet is not, at this time, a certified medical device.

In an overview of baby wearables, David King (2014, p. 2), a clinical lecturer in pediatrics, warns that none of these devices, including the Owlet, are certified as medical tools and that “medical professionals and consumers need to be aware that such devices have no proved use in safeguarding infants or detecting health problems, and they certainly have no role in preventing SIDS.” Moreover, King argues that the prominence of these devices and rhetoric employed in the sales could easily mislead parents into believing that these are tested and certified medical equipment. Relegated to the footer of the website, underneath much larger logos linking to Owlet social media pages, the Owlet website quietly states, “Owlet is intended to provide peace of mind. It is not intended to diagnose, treat, mitigate, cure, or prevent any disease or condition” (Owlet Baby Care, 2016a). A more detailed inspection of the even less visible Terms and Conditions reveals that

Notably, the Owlet Baby Care company has received US$9 million in startup funding (TechCrunch, 2015) and has received prominent recognition at technology industry events, including the Best Startup Award at CES 2016 (Lee, 2016). The combination of startup funding, which necessitates a long-term business model, and very carefully worded disclaimers which do the legal work of avoiding claims of medical certification positions the Owlet company very much as a technology and big data analysis company.

In the “Information We Collect Automatically” section, the company website notes,

Interrelated Terms and Conditions, End User License Agreements, and Privacy Policies are notoriously under-read by users who agree to them (usually without being compelled to read them at all) and are often altered in ways which suit the changing needs of the company rather than users (van Dijck, 2013a, pp. 38-39). The complex disclaimers and agreements on the Owlet website suggest that the company is purposefully gathering as much data as possible, often in ways that would be far from obvious to users. As with the health apps mentioned above, the Owlet company clearly sells two commodities: first, the infant wearable itself, which is carefully pitched to parents as providing affective reassure and “peace of mind,” and, second, the aggregated big data produced by the Owlet devices through surveillance of an increasingly large number of infants. These big data are then aggregated and analyzed to produce further insight and value. Indeed, from their earliest company videos, Owlet has argued that the big data generated by their devices will “help researchers find cures, causes and predictive models for infant ailments” (Owlet Baby Care, 2013). In an updated Owlet Vision video (Owlet Baby Care, 2015), the company’s founders go a step further, stating “The thing that’s most interesting is we’re collecting the largest data set about infant health and sleep and wellness and safety that’s ever been collected.” The Owlet big data collection is the direct and purposeful outcome of intimate surveillance in the form of the Owlet smart sock.

For Andrejevic and Burdon (2015), the massive increase in surveillance and sensors of many kinds, generating enormous amounts of data in various forms, many of them privately owned, has led to the rise of what they term a “sensor society.” The logic of the sensor society is to generate and capture as much detailed data as possible, which is then stored and aggregated. Once captured, these data can be analyzed and mined in a variety of ways, many of them not clear from the outset, even to those data scientists driving the analyses. Andrejevic and Burdon warn that while many companies claim not to capture personally identifying information—by which they usually mean full names—the type, complexity, and breadth of data being captured often mean that specific groups and individuals can, in fact, be identified through data patterns and analysis itself. The promise of anonymity, so often woven into privacy policies and terms of use, may mean increasingly little. Drawing attention to the operation of the sensor society

The Owlet infant wearable positions babies as part of this sensor society, while the marketing rhetoric and promise of “peace of mind” normalize intimate surveillance as the responsible and sensible choice for parents.

In their study of the quantified self-movement, Smith and Vonthethoff (2017, p. 11) argue that

Extending these ideas, the interface of the Owlet app generates stories both for and about infants, but these stories are crucially also for the parents, who view the glowing green of the Owlet base station, or green indicators and reassuring measurements displayed on the app, as a story about the immediate health and well-being of their child. Yet as Jill Rettberg has warned, apps which document and capture moments, interactions, or other elements of infancy in their design can also limit the ways in which infancy is understood, conceptualized, narrated, and recorded (Rettberg, 2014). The well-being of an infant might be the story told by reassuring apps on a mobile phone and a glowing green indicator on the Owlet base station, but these indicators may well shape and alter other practices of early parenthood in ways not immediately clear. What is clear, though, is that infant wearables, of which the Owlet is for now the most well-known, are normalizing parental practices of monitoring and surveillance. The Owlet encourages an intimate surveillance in which well-intentioned parents are recording their infant’s biometric data and allowing the Owlet company to aggregate and monetize this as a valuable big data resource. Moreover, the Owlet and related devices are directly associating good parenting with dataveillance which is an association that is likely to persist as a child grows.

Parents have a long history of using the web to discuss and share parenting practices, from emails, discussion groups, and online forums to, more recently, Facebook, bespoke apps, and other social media platforms (Lupton, Pedersen, & Thomas, 2016). Among these discussions, parents often share information about their children, initially as text, but more recently in a variety of forms including photographs and videos, mediating their children’s initial online presence. For a small group who have built large online followings, talking publicly about their parenting practices, experiences, and children has seen them shift into what have alternatively been called micro-celebrities or influencers (Abidin, 2015a, 2016). Micro-celebrity is the result of purposeful self-presentation strategies online which often utilize the same techniques as marketing and branding campaigns, but at a smaller and seemingly more intimate or personal level as a means to increase their online popularity and ongoing audience (Marwick, 2013; Senft, 2013). In terms of parenting micro-celebrities, some have emerged from other fields, bringing a certain level of popularity with them, while others have grown their online attention from the ground up. While often purposefully and explicitly attempting to use their online presences to make a living, micro-celebrities are often seen as very authentic online voices, and this sense of authenticity often helps maintain their audience levels. It also means that micro-celebrity parents can be quite influential in promoting and normalizing certain shifts in parenting practices. The combination of a specific focus on parenting and seeming authenticity of their voices situates parental micro-celebrities as affective amplifiers, having significant influence at a time when new parents in particular are seeking information and direction online.

One of the strategies employed by the Owlet company is to sponsor parental micro-celebrity reviews of the Owlet monitor. A cursory review of the Owlet blog shows that the company often does wrap-up posts where they mention four or five micro-celebrities who have reviewed the Owlet in the previous month. Happily Eva After is written by Eva Amurri Martino, who is a popular parental micro-celebrity and also an actress coming from a Hollywood family and has over 58,000 followers on Instagram. She wrote a post in June 2016 entitled “Peace of Mind with Owlet Baby Care”(Martino, 2016) in which she talked about challenges she faced getting enough sleep with her previous baby and how the Owlet will help by giving her “peace of mind (and a much more restful sleep!).” The post includes a number of photographs of Martino cradling the smart sock and positioning it on top of a onesie purchased for her child, due later in the year. The photographs and text are written in glowing terms, and the post ends with a bespoke link to purchase the Owlet with an instant discount for people coming from Martino’s post. A brief examination of another five micro-celebrity reviews of the Owlet follows a similar layout and formula. On Positively Oakes, Oakes’ review notes that her baby “still wears hers and it gives me peace of mind and the ability to sleep better and get more done during the day” (Oakes, 2015) and her post similarly has some well-shot photographs of her baby wearing the Owlet and ends with a “readers” discount. While it is true that whenever any money is involved, the question of sponsorship and advertising inevitably influences in some way what a parental blogger will share online (Blum-Ross & Livingstone, 2016), the point here is not a critique of the commerciality of micro-celebrity parents. Rather, I seek to emphasize the formulaic way that the Owlet is reviewed, with the same style of photography and text, and that the same expression “peace of mind” that dominates the Owlet’s official marketing material so readily reappears on reviews by parental micro-celebrities. Readers of Happily Eva After, Positively Oakes, or any of the other parental micro-celebrities are likely to be aware that these are sponsored comments, but the frequency with which stock phrases and images appear, and consistency of the message, goes a long way toward normalizing ownership of the Owlet and the associated surveillance and monitoring. Parental micro-celebrities are thus affective amplifiers, functioning as curators of information, taste, and changing parenting practices.

One of the most visible examples of micro-celebrity parental mediation occurs when parents do not just post about their children, but post as their children, using social media accounts in their name, becoming what Crystal Abidin (2015b) has dubbed “micro-microcelebrities.” The 2016 Rio Olympics saws the emergence of one such micro-microcelebrity, Boomer Phelps, the infant son of Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps and Nicole Johnson. Phelps and Johnson are both celebrities in their own right, with sizable followings on Instagram, 3.1 million and 427,000 followers, respectively. Debuting Boomer’s Instagram account shortly after his birth, in the lead up to the 2016 Rio Olympics, The Daily Mail announced that “Boomer makes a splash on social media as his dad heads to the pool for first day of competition” (Wilkinson, 2016), while The Hollywood Reporter went a step further declaring the baby “Rio’s accidental style icon” (Reed, 2016). Boomer’s account features him often doing fairly typical baby things, in outfits, or playing, but also includes his parents and photographs with celebrities including Simon Cowell and Jimmy Fallon (taken when his father was appearing on their shows). His Instagram account gained almost 200,000 new followers during the Olympic Games and now eclipses his mother’s account, with 753,000 followers. It is notable that Boomer’s Instagram account has a blue tick, indicating it is an account verified by Instagram which implies that Instagram’s policies support parents running accounts for their children, under their children’s names, at least in the case of celebrity parents. Some micro-celebrities, and certainly most celebrities, have access to advice about posting material online, or agents and publicists who manage the process. While explicitly located within commercial practices, their children are nevertheless purposefully publicized in a considered way. However, the many followers of these parental micro-celebrities, and their micro-microcelebrity offspring, are less likely to have access to that advice, but may be strongly influenced to replicate the mediation and sharing of their own children, following these normalized examples. That is not to say followers will directly and exactly mimic micro-celebrities, but rather the climate for sharing online is informed and contextualized by these sharing practices in a way which makes publicly sharing images and details of children’s lives online more and more acceptable and mundane.