How are Ethics Addressed in the Baby Tech Industry?
In an industry where babies are the primary consumers, how are their rights such as consent taken into account, and can they even be?
What exactly is the baby tech industry? The baby tech industry integrates data collection from technology in order to provide the baby’s information to the parents with ease. This is particularly helpful for giving information regarding the infant’s vitals through technology such as wireless baby monitors and smart feeding solutions. The ability to give parents ease that their child is healthy is what gives this industry a lot of potential for the future.
Because this is relatively still an emerging industry, there are many questions as to how ethics play a role in the baby tech industry as a whole. Ethics standards give a sense of direction and purpose as to how a company conducts its work, treats employees, and essentially determines the overall “feel” and purpose of the company to serve the community. Since an essential aspect to the baby tech industry is data collection, how are babies, who are unable to give direct consent, allow their data to be collected and analyzed — is this ethically “correct”?
With data collection on popular sites such as Facebook and Google, the question of ethics is much more “cut and dry” since it is easy for voluntary users to give their consent. But for babies (ie. the main consumers of baby tech products), it is impossible to get this direct consent due to the inability to communicate this idea to them. Because of this, do we give parents the right to their consent even thought it isn’t their data? Is there some way to maintain a baby’s autonomy with respect to their collected data? If AI technology fails to maintain the security of collected data, how is this handled and who (if any) is at fault?
Questions such as these give us a conceptual framework for handling ethics in the baby tech industry, allowing us to recognize the main issues at hand. Incorporating methods such as analyzing case studies within this industry can allow further insight into what issues have been tackled in the past and how they’ve been tackled, as well as applying these concepts to similar issues that still have “gray areas.” A large influence of how these issues are tackled depends on the shared interests and motives of employees in the company, which is why establishing ethical standards is very essential to the identity of the company. In the case of baby tech, ethical standards should appropriately be focused on providing for the best interest of the baby and their parents.
Though there is much more to be discovered about the working of the baby tech industry, the applications of its technology have promising potential for the current and next generation of parents and their babies.
