UN Committee on the Rights of the Child: Comments from the Lab
The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child is drafting a general comment on children’s rights in relation to the digital environment. McStay, Miyashita, Rosner and Urquhart from The Emotional Lab entered a submission, offering insight and comment on the draft general comment. In the Lab’s submission, they discuss technologies that gauge child biometrics to infer emotion and other qualitative states. They focus on: (1) children’s toys and services; and (2) educational technologies (edtech).
Derived from empirical work, key insights are:
o Emotional AI technology is not yet in widespread use in children’s products, but is expected to increasingly appear in the 2020s.
o Parents have mixed feelings about emotional AI used with their children: they see benefits, and they are wary.
o Experts in child development, child privacy, education technology, online safety and emotional AI see serious potential harms to the introduction of emotion and mood detection to children’s products.
o Current data protection and privacy law is very focused on adults. Such regulations are likely not comprehensive enough to address the potential harms of child-focused emotional AI.
o Policymakers should consider a ban on using children’s emotion data to market to them or their parents.
o The use of emotion detection technologies, and the storage of data about children’s moods and emotions, could have long-lasting impacts and cause children to be treated unfairly, both in childhood and later in adulthood.
o The UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child is valuable to guide the governance of children’s emotional AI technologies, but careful interpretation of §1 Art. 29 (on development of the child to their fullest potential) is required.
Readers interested in UN work, children and technology might also be interested in the Policy guidance on AI for children report by UNICEF. Through contribution by McStay, the Lab helped with issues on emotional AI and child profiling.
