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"She recounts the moment when her 13-year-old son Jacob - now 16 - was sent to isolation for refusing to register his fingerprint to use the school canteen. "I went to school and said that I didn't give my consent. As a parent I want to be clear that the decisions I make that affect my children are in their best interests."

"The founders of Predictim want to be clear with me: Their product-an algorithm that scans the online footprint of a prospective babysitter to determine their "risk" levels for parents-is not racist. It is not biased. "We take ethics and bias extremely seriously," Sal Parsa, Predictim's CEO, tells me warily over the phone. "In fact, in the last 18 months we trained our product, our machine, our algorithm to make sure it was ethical and not biased. We took sensitive attributes, protected classes, sex, gender, race, away from our training set. We continuously audit our model. And on top of that we added a human review process.""

""Privacy Not Included" is Mozilla's Christmas shopping (anti)-guide to toys and gadgets that spy on you and/or make stupid security blunders, rated by relative "creepiness," from the Nintendo Switch (a little creepy) to the Fredi Baby monitor (very creepy!). Mozilla's reviews include a detailed rationale for each ranking, including whether the product includes encryption, whether it forces a default password change, how easy to understand the documentation is, whether it shares your data for "unexpected reasons," whether it has known security vulnerabilities, whether it has parental controls and more."

"Just ahead of the first anniversary of its release, Indian law enforcers are accusing the popular game of inciting violence and distracting kids from their studies, even pushing for a large-scale prohibition of the "battle-royal" style shooter. Following numerous complaints by parents, a temporary ban on the mobile app was first announced by police in metropolitan Rajkot, with some other cities multiplayer-game soon following suit. While the current ban only extends until March 30, the police and children's rights watchdog are petitioning New Delhi to ban the game altogether"

"The uniforms allow school officials, teachers, and parents to keep track of the exact times that students leave or enter the school, Lin Zongwu, principal of the No. 11 School of Renhuai in Guizhou Province, told the state-run newspaper Global Times on Dec. 20. If students skip school without permission, an alarm will be triggered. If students try to game the system by swapping uniforms, an alarm also will sound, as facial-recognition equipment stationed at the school entrance can match a student's face with the chip embedded in the uniform."

"If that data is collected, does the child have a right to get it back? If that data is collected from very early childhood and does not belong to the child, does it make the child extra vulnerable because his or her choices and patterns of behaviour could be known to anyone who purchases the data, for example, companies or political campaigns. Depending on the privacy laws of the state in which the toys are being used, if the data is collected and kept, it breaches Article 16 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child - the right to privacy. (Though, of course, arguably this is something parents routinely do by posting pictures of their children on Facebook). "

"Scientists must embrace circumspection, transparency, and robust ways of working that safeguard against bias and analytical flexibility. Doing so will provide parents and policymakers with the reliable insights they need on a topic most often characterized by unfounded media hype."

"That was apparently the result of the US government's probing of visa applicants' social media profiles. After the search, an officer questioned the 17-year-old, who got a scholarship to study in the US, about his friends' social media activity and told him she'd found some "posting political points of view that oppose the US," the student paper noted. Despite Ajjawi's protests, the officer denied the student's entry and let him call his parents."

"A hacker has stolen millions of user account details from popular education platform Edmodo, and the data is apparently for sale on the so-called dark web. Teachers, students and parents use Edmodo to work on lesson plans, assign homework, and more. The organization claims to have over 78 million members."

"But could robots ever reproduce? This, undoubtedly, forms a pillar of "life" as shared by all natural organisms. A team of researchers from the UK and the Netherlands have recently demonstrated a fully automated technology to allow physical robots to repeatedly breed, evolving their artificial genetic code over time to better adapt to their environment. Arguably, this amounts to artificial evolution. Child robots are created by mixing the digital "DNA" from two parent robots on a computer."

"But BERT, which is now being deployed in services like Google's internet search engine, has a problem: It could be picking up on biases in the way a child mimics the bad behavior of his parents. BERT is one of a number of A.I. systems that learn from lots and lots of digitized information, as varied as old books, Wikipedia entries and news articles."

"Those who design this stuff are plainly doing so for people close in age to themselves. But surely no harm would come from them considering whether their parents or grandparents would have any chance of fathoming out whatever new consumer electronics they are working on."

"In one case, a government campaign aimed at helping young people off benefits was targeted at Facebook users with interests including "afro-textured hair" and the "West Indies cricket team". Other campaigns have targeted LGBTQ+ content at people interested in "genderqueer" issues and the TV show RuPaul's Drag Race; council support services at people interested in "hijabs" and "Islamic dietary requirements"; and an appeal for witnesses to a murder in Manchester aimed at people interested in "hip-hop", "rapping", Kim Kardashian and Usain Bolt. The "microtargeting" is revealed in analysis of more than 12,000 ads which ran on Facebook and Instagram between late 2020 and 2023. Supplied to UK academics by Facebook's parent company Meta, and shared with the Observer, the data gives an insight into the use of targeted advertising by the state based on profiling by the world's biggest social media company. In 2021, Facebook announced a ban on targeting based on race, religion and sexual orientation amid concerns about discrimination, which led to the removal of several interest categories that had been used by advertisers to reach and exclude minority groups."

"This is because emojis - as many unfortunates have discovered (often gen X parents, but that I, a millennial in her early 30s, am increasingly, devastatingly, discovering) - do not always have clearcut meanings. This is true of all language of course - and emojis are a type of language, despite what the likes of John Humphrys et al have sneered in the past. A thumbs-up emoji, to take the example from the Canadian case, can, just as in offline life, be used sarcastically. (This was noted in the court ruling.) In some regions such as in the Middle East a thumbs-up can be offensive."

"That evening was the start of a long nightmare. Whenever Alana forbade Cody from gaming, he had panic attacks, wailing and weeping. He writhed on the floor and told his parents he wanted to die. "It was like taking heroin away from an addict," says Alana. Sometimes she thought, maybe today it will be different, and so she let him play. But the behaviour never changed. "We felt like his drug dealers.""

""Just like any drug you can never get enough," says Olivia, a 50-year-old British author who describes the frightening experience of "living to play a game". In the depths of her addiction, her physical and mental health were at a low and she accumulated over £30,000 (US$37,500) of debt from in-game micro-purchases. In some cases, gamers can forget to eat or sleep, losing jobs and relationships in the process. In one incident in South Korea, a newborn starved to death while her parents gamed, and last year a 12-year-old Australian boy killed himself amid a gaming addiction."

"The BBC spoke to several students and parents who vouched for the quality of Byju's learning content - in a country where rote learning is often the norm, Byju's has been credited for deftly using technology to create immersive, engaging lessons. It also claims to have the industry's highest net promoter score (NPS), which measures customer experience and predicts business growth. "

"Amazon is to pay $25m (£20m) to settle allegations that it violated children's privacy rights with its Alexa voice assistant. The company agreed to pay the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) after it was accused of failing to delete Alexa recordings at the request of parents. It was found to have kept hold of sensitive data for years. Amazon's doorbell camera unit Ring will also pay out after giving employees unrestricted access to customers' data."

"Generational differences in learning techniques are apparent in how people of different ages approach technology. It has been said that we, the Net Generation, are closer to our grandparents-the Greatest Generation-in our work ethic and optimism about the future than to our parents' generation. But how we approach problems is totally different."

"A scammer paid Facebook's parent company $7,000 to reach up to 100,000 people in Australia with a deepfake A Current Affair video featuring altered versions of Jim Chalmers, Dick Smith, Andrew Forrest and Gina Rinehart, data reveals. Smith issued a warning to the public earlier this week after a video began circulating on Facebook and Instagram in recent weeks. The video was designed to appear like a segment on A Current Affair, featuring host Ally Langdon seemingly interviewing the treasurer and the rich listers about an investment opportunity."