A childhood on the record¶

A child today is one of the most closely watched people in the world and one of the least able to consent to any of it. Before a baby can speak, there is often a name, a birth date, a face, and a rough location circulating through apps, clouds, and the accounts of proud relatives. By the time a child is old enough to ask who holds their data, the answer already runs to dozens of companies.

The adults around a child, parents, carers, teachers, are the ones who can act on any of this, so it is written for them. It is not a guide to locking children down, and not a panic about screens. It asks the ordinary questions, what is at stake, who acts on it, how, and what the harm looks like, for someone too young to answer them for themselves.

What makes children a distinct case¶

Three things set this apart from an adult threat model.

The first is consent. A child cannot meaningfully agree to being profiled, and for younger children the law says a parent agrees on their behalf. The data is collected anyway, often from the moment of a first app or a first photograph, well before the person it describes has any say.

The second is time. A data trail begun in childhood is uniquely long-lived. A profile assembled from a decade of apps, games, school systems, and posts by others follows a person into adulthood, into job applications, insurance, credit, and relationships, long after the child who generated it has changed beyond recognition. Children are the only group whose entire life can be on the record before they are old enough to have shaped any of it.

The third is the double role of the adults. For most people the watchers are strangers: companies, states, advertisers. For a child, some of the most constant watching comes from the people who love them, through parental controls, location sharing, and photographs posted with pride. That watching is usually well meant. It is also surveillance, it teaches a child what to expect of being watched, and the same tools can be turned to control.

Where the practical steps live¶

Understanding is one thing; doing is another, and the doing lives elsewhere on the site. The Greenhouse games introduce children themselves to these ideas through play. For an adult, checking a device for stalkerware, auditing shared accounts, and stripping metadata from photos each cover part of it.

Last reviewed: 2026-07-08.