Analysis
- An ideal technology for “good parents”
Emerging technologies promise to act as caring media (Gibson, Hjorth, & Choi, 2021), enabling people to practice social support in intimate contexts within their daily lives. Accordingly, companies often market smart devices for children as helpful assistants for good parenting. For instance, one frequently mentioned slogan in several IMOO advertisements is that “no matter where you are, I am just a call away”. Video calling and real-time location tracking are the main functions of IMOO kids’ smartwatches, satisfying the parents’ desire to carefully monitor their children at all times even if this is potentially invasive (Leaver, 2017). Additionally, IMOO’s advertising includes assumptions about mothers’ roles in practicing surveillance, posed as necessary to ensure children’s safety. For instance, in IMOO’s ads—either in videos or on its website—there are common scenarios where mothers actively track their children’s locations with a mobile phone map or through video calling. In contrast, very few of IMOO’s advertisements touch upon father or fatherhood. In one ad, although the father seldom spends time with his daughter, even missing her birthday, he claims to be a “model dad” after giving his daughter a kids’ smartwatch as a gift. Taken together, by presenting motherhood and fatherhood differently, IMOO’s commercials highlight gender hierarchies in parenting which require mothers to always be around and care for children while rationalizing the absence of fathers.
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| A father admits that he rarely spends time with his daughter and then decides to give her an IMOO kids’ smartwatch as a gift to provide a sense of companionship. | |
It is also worth noting that the features of IMOO kids’ smartwatches are largely simplified. For instance, a 2016 advertising video states, “With a kids’ smartwatch, children can make calls and show locations; a kids’ smartwatch has no games and is waterproof, making it more convenient than any cell phone”. Marketing themselves as a stopgap cellphone for kids, IMOO kids’ smartwatches assure parents that they need not worry about their children’s Internet addiction, reinforce parental control over their children’s technology use, and thus successfully become an ideal technology for “good parents.”
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| A boy says a kids’ smartwatch is more convenient than a cellphone by showing his IMOO kids’ smartwatch after throwing away a cellphone. | |
However, being a good parent is not just offered by the affordances for monitoring children’ safety or deliberately not offering video game entertainment. Rather, IMOO’s advertising reinforces the idea that parental tracking of children’ real-time location with a mobile phone map is a form of “intimate surveillance” (Lupton & Williamson, 2017). Although kids’ smartwatches promote an idealized image of dedicated parents, in fact data collection, processing, and even exploitation occur constantly in digitized parental care. For example, one IMOO leaflet claims to provide “‘accurate location tracking, mood recognition, heart rate monitoring, temperature monitoring, wear recognition, and behavioral status’…Six dimensions let you know where your child is, what they are doing, and how they are feeling.” This promotion recalls other products on the market, such as a smart lamp for detecting children’s poor posture (Lim & Wang, 2024) or the so-called “smart classroom behavior management system” for monitoring students’ attentiveness (SCMP, 2018). While the features of children’s smartwatches seem powerful, all quantification and prediction practices are based on behavioral or biological data generated by children in real time and thus raise concerns about children’s data security (Mascheroni & Holloway, 2019). IMOO’s ads only show the advantages of the “quantified child” for parenting while never explaining how children’s privacy will be protected. These products are introducing surveillance capitalism as a constitutive part of children’s lifecycles without their knowledge.
Advertising targeted at children also reveals adult cultural norms and consumption attitudes. While IMOO’s ads as a whole appeal to parental care for their children, a 2019 advertising video that explains the technical architecture of kids’ smartwatches more clearly targets adults as the audience. This ad depicts the production process of kids’ smartwatches in a factory, with technical terms such as “1.41-inch retina screen,” “Qualcomm Snapdragon processor,” and “silicon anode batteries.” The use of specialized technical concepts suggests that the ad does not intend to make children understand the smartwatches’ functions but rather to convince parents that IMOO technology is effective and advanced. In this way, IMOO kids’ smartwatch advertising also satisfies the adult parents’ desire to consume digital products that are constantly being updated.
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| A 2019 advertising video describes the technical architecture of IMOO kids’ smartwatches with technical terms. | |
- Assuring children’ autonomy in purchasing and using smartwatches
A traditional conception of children as unable to control their emotions and lacking rational thought culturally distinguishes children from adults, giving rise to the idea that children must be protected. However, the consumer culture promoted by IMOO’s commercials tends to celebrate children’s autonomy and sense of self. “Choice” is an important part of marketing discourse. Here it is used to assert children’s “consumer citizenship” (Banet-Weiser, 2007), as the idea of “choice” appears to empower children to make purchase decisions across a wide range of products. As we will see, choice—as a value in and of itself—is woven into IMOO marketing discourse and is indelibly tied to the idea of self-surveillance.
For example, two of IMOO’s ads are co-branded with movies popular among children—Transformers and Spider-Man—encouraging children to purchase customized versions of kids’ smartwatches based on their preferences for cartoon characters. The emphasis on children’s choices in these ads stimulates children’s spending power in the market. While asserting children’s sense of self, IMOO’s ads also portray children as having a significant impact on family purchases (Jacobson, 2004). IMOO’s ads screened on Children’s Day or Chinese New Year include these questions: “Mom, the holiday is coming. Where is the surprise you said you would give me? You didn’t forget it, right? I did very well in my exams, what is the reward?”. Of course, kids’ smartwatches show up in IMOO’s ads as the only gift children want: children who get smartwatches are excited, while those who don’t get them are disappointed.
Meanwhile, the functions of kids’ smartwatches perversely connect the autonomy of the consumer child to their self-surveillance while using it. Unlike surveillance undertaken by ‘others,’ self-surveillance emerges as an apparently helpful means for people to exercise self-control, self-tracking, or engage in self-improvement (Lupton & Williamson, 2017; Gill, 2019; De Moya & Pallud, 2020). In IMOO’s advertisements, smartwatches provide children with joy and a sense of reassurance through datafication. For example, children in the ads actively show their real-time locations or happily say “yay” to the smartwatch camera. Further, such depictions are deeply gendered, portraying girls as benefitting the most under self-surveillance. For instance, ads often tie girls’ uses of smartwatches with a scenario that a girl is leaving home, as mothers tell them to be sure to bring their smartwatches with them to stay safe. However, images of boys using kids’ smartwatches are often associated with engaging in sports or DIY projects. Such gendered advertising perpetuate hetero-patriarchal social norms, such as women’s submissive social roles in male/female hierarchies (Valdes, 1996) or gadget culture or technical specifications as expressions of masculinity (Ammari, Schoenebeck, & Lindtner, 2017).
News about technology for children in China have reported that kids’ smartwatches lack advanced privacy protection mechanisms, so they can easily leak children’s location, photos, and other private data (e.g., CGTN, 2017, 2022; SCMP, 2019). However, in IMOO’s ads, children wearing IMOO smartwatches are always depicted as happy and are never portrayed as individuals who might voice opposition to dataveillance. Indeed, IMOO never tells children and their parents in the ads how kids’ smartwatches will process and store data extracted from children’s bodies and daily behaviors. But the brand’s trick of monetizing and exploiting children’s digital data is not totally untraceable. For example, IMOO describes on its official website that it is open to partnerships with other Chinese digital platforms (such as the music platform NetEase Music and the mobile payment platform Alipay), as the massive number of high-quality IMOO kids’ smartwatch users gives the brand a strong advantage in terms of traffic distribution (IMOO, n.d.). Moreover, IMOO has also written in its product privacy policy that it will collect and use user’s personal information without prior consent in cases directly related to national security, national defense, public safety, public health, significant public interest, etc., or share such data with administrative and judicial agencies for specific investigative purposes (IMOO, 2022). Finally, although the news has reported that kids’ smartwatches are vulnerable to hacking for cyber-criminal purposes, IMOO is silent on measures to ensure the security of children’s data in kids’ smartwatches. All of these factors indicate that the technology industry and government agencies use children’s personal data to upgrade products, make profits, and expand nationwide everyday surveillance.
- With IMOO, children become good friends
In using monitoring devices, users are not just self-tracking but often revealing personal information online as a way to present themselves and foster social connections (Lupton & Williamson, 2017; Marwick, 2012). The latter activity exemplifies “social surveillance” when considering the quantified child. IMOO kids’ smartwatches have a special function to add friends; that is, a child can simply touch his or her IMOO smartwatch to others’. Based on this function, IMOO’s commercials state, “You have a smartwatch, I have a smartwatch, then we become good friends”. By engendering feelings of exclusivity and enjoyment in peer groups, IMOO effectively forms a club for children who use IMOO smartwatches, cultivating brand loyalty among the children who then continuously generate data for IMOO’s expansion into their daily activities and interactions.
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| A 2015 advertising video shows the function of touching smartwatches to add friends. | A 2018 advertising video films two children playing together, with the slogan “You have a smartwatch, I have a smartwatch, then we become good friends." |
Besides the function of “adding friends,” IMOO’s kids’ smartwatches also come with a pedometer. The pedometer is not only used to encourage children to do physical exercise but also has an explicitly social function. Specifically, IMOO’s advertising films a girl asking her male friend to walk together, with the slogan, “You are my friend. Good friends walk together.” On top of that, the ad also features children comparing their daily steps or giving each other’s steps a “like” using the smartwatches. According to Marwick (2012), social surveillance not only helps maintain intimacy among friends but formulates norms that define what is appropriate or inappropriate behavior. By encouraging children to share personal data in heteronormative interactions via smart devices, IMOO’s advertising helps normalize dataveillance by digital platforms and incorporates children as data subjects for future profiting in China’s digital economy.
Because it creates a restriction that only children who use IMOO smartwatches can add friends and interact with each other, IMOO also motivates parents to buy IMOO smartwatches so their children won’t be ostracized by peers. Further, narratives in IMOO’s advertising imply that consuming IMOO kids’ smartwatches leads to both children’s and parents’ upward mobility or greater social status. For instance, multiple ads are set in middle-class families with images of several children with children’s smartwatches skateboarding, playing hockey, or going on field trips, seemingly eliminating class differences or differences in family economic levels. This kind of depiction also accelerates the gendered regime of care work because mothers currently assume more labor for digital parenting—that is, labor such as seeking child-rearing information, using education services online, or monitoring children’s activities (Peng, 2022).
Discussion and conclusion
A feminist perspective further guided me to reflect on the power relations woven into the everyday surveillance enabled by kids’ smartwatches. For one thing, the childcare mediated by kids’ smartwatches was framed as only the mothers’ responsibilities—no matter if they are at work or not. The fathers’ occasional involvement in, and often absence from, parenting is portrayed as acceptable, and the role of public services in ensuring the (data) safety of children is never interrogated. Additionally, the ads more often promoted girls as consumers and beneficiaries of surveillance technologies, maintaining hetero-patriarchal social norms through which the powerful states and corporations exercise their benevolent yet masculine control over women and other disadvantaged groups via abstract data extraction in the name of care (Abu-Laban, 2015). As the centrality of children in modernization has emphasized values such as empowerment and protection, the public commonly holds the belief that parents ought to interfere with children’s media use. While such interference may benefit children by preventing them from the harm brought on by the overconsumption of technology, parental care for children also provides a “good reason” in tech companies’ commercials to sugarcoat their surveillance activities for profits, ultimately conferring risks to children’s digital rights.
Moreover, the rapid market expansion of kids’ smartwatches in China could be understood in connection with the current national social-political dynamics, primarily the decline in national population along with increased parental stress. It has been commonly observed, particularly in anti-terrorism contexts such as school surveillance in the United States, that producers of security equipment cultivate perceived risks in order to maintain a huge market for their products (Taylor, 2017). In the case of the present study, the promotion of kids’ smartwatches as a typical surveillance technology in China adopts and employs a similar strategy: by generating and promoting a culture of parental stress; in that case, the kids’ smartwatches market themselves as helpful assistants in child care. As discourse surrounding kids’ smartwatches echoes the development of China’s population policy, such as the three-child policy, the expansion of the smartwatches has been boosted with the support of Chinese state capitalism, in which the Chinese party-state actively collaborates with the private sector whilst maintaining its political control (Huang & Tsai, 2022). Indeed, IMOO has been developing partnerships with the state-controlled telecommunication industry to expand sales channels.
We can also think about the rise of IMOO kids’ smartwatches along with the exercise of surveillance more broadly and China’s global leadership in AI. Specifically, the focus on caring for children in IMOO’s commercials is accompanied by themes of the gendered regime of parental care and the gendered discipline of girls in Chinese middle-class families, exemplifying a standard form of gendered and ethnonationalist citizenship that positions the child as the central subject. A similar logic of surveillance is embedded within broader datafied social management in China. Examples include the construction of social credit systems that aim at quantifying citizens’ behaviors to combat individualism (Liu & Rona-Tas, 2024), and the development of settler colonialism in Xinjiang that enforces ethno-racial policing of Uyghur men for capitalist accumulation (Byler, 2021). AI surveillance technologies are among those technologies exported to governments of countries along the Digital Silk Road (Feldstein, 2019). In a geopolitical sense, China’s export of digital technologies and infrastructures to these countries contributes to China’s increasing power in global Internet governance (Shen, 2018). Compared to common surveillance technologies such as surveillance cameras installed in public spaces, devices such as kids’ smartwatches that are usually applied in families or intimate scenarios deserve further examination.
Two major questions remain unresolved in my study. First, while I teased out the complicated relations between the market and the Chinese party-state in everyday surveillance, as embodied in the case of kids’ smartwatches, I was not able to gain sufficient supporting materials, especially policy documents, to uncover more details. Second, while IMOO mainly relies on the Chinese market for now, it also has export businesses[2] and has been developing overseas markets in Southeast Asia since the beginning of 2019 (CNMO, 2017). Future research can further explore the implications of China’s export of AI surveillance technologies in terms of not only transnational capitalist accumulation and exploitations but connections between the global rise of surveillance and right-wing politics, Chinese transnational control of telecommunication infrastructures, and cross-cultural effects of modifying social ideas about parenting and privacy.
