Bidding Farewell to Barbie – Welcoming Alexa, Siri and Google. Voice Assistants and Children's Rights

This poster illustrates the research findings concerning the implementation of children’s rights to privacy and data protection in Europe, and particularly the requirements associated with the principle of transparency under the EU data protection law. Article 12 (1) of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires service providers to “take appropriate measures to provide any information [...] relating to processing to the data subject in a concise, transparent, intelligible and easily accessible form, using clear and plain language, in particular for any information addressed specifically to a child”. Recital 58 GDPR provides further clarity, stating that “any information and communication, where processing is addressed to a child, should be in such a clear and plain language that the child can easily understand”. The particular (items of) information that should be provided to data subjects is listed in articles 13 and 14 GDPR. The poster summarises the provisional findings of a compliance check exercise unravelling whether and how the privacy and data policies of the three most popular voice assistants available in Europe – Amazon Echo, Google Nest and Apple HomePod – comply with the GDPR transparency requirements in terms of the processing of children’s (voice) data. More generally, this research investigates how child-friendly transparency could be put into practice and explore a number of methods that could be adopted to achieve this goal.