What do children mean when they say technology is creepy?
This article summarizes a paper authored by Jason C. Yip, Kiley Sobel, Xin Gao, Allison Marie Hishikawa, Alexis Lim, Laura Meng, Romaine Flor Ofiana, Justin Park, and Alexis Hiniker. This paper will be presented at CHI 2019, a conference of Human-Computer Interaction, on Wednesday 8th May 2019 at 9:00 in the session Privacy and Young People.
What makes children think certain technologies are creepy but view others as benign?
To investigate this question, we conducted four participatory design sessions with 11 children (ages 7 -11) to design and evaluate creepy technologies, followed by interviews with the same children.
What Do Children Fear?
Children’s fears about the risks technology fell into two different categories:
Physical Harm. Children in our study often used morbid words such as “kill,” “murder,” and “death” to convey their fears about creepy technologies. They constantly referred to physical harm when describing creepy or unknown technologies. Children described, for example, technologies that try to punish their users and technologies to stalk others and cause harm.
Loss of Attachment. Children’s second recurring fear was that creepy technologies would take them away from their parents or otherwise intrude on relationships with people they love. A child in our interview stated that creepy technologies take you away from mom and dad. The children in our study had this fear of technology “taking over your life” so that they would be unable to be with their real parents.
What Makes Children Think a Technology is Creepy?
Kids told us that certain signals make technology seem creepy and arouse fears of physical harm or separation from their parents. The six signals that came up repeatedly were:
Deception. The children in our study frequently expressed fears about technology intentionally deceiving them. For instance, one child noted: “Like I’ll say -call Jan Smith [mom, pseudonym] and it [digital voice assistant] will call that person. Okay, it will call them. Then when I ask -will you kill me in my sleep? It says -I can’t answer that.” Here, the child wanted a direct NO in the answer to his question on killing him in his sleep, rather than an “I don’t know.”
Mimicry. Children expressed concerns about technology mimicking them or other people, potentially giving it the power to subsume their identity. Children in our study worried about too much information taken from technology so that it could, “steal your identity,” replace you, or take you away from your family.
Control. Children expressed concerns about the ability to control the flow of information, the actions of technology, and its output. For instance, one child expressed that if they could not control Amazon Alexa, the technology would seem creepy: “Yeah, so, it’s like Alexa is in this room and she starts interrupting this conversation.”
Unpredictability. Children explained that systems whose behavior they could not predict — such as a digital assistant that no longer responds to its wake word — led them to worry that something that seems harmless might become sinister.
Ominous Physical Appearance. The superficial look, sound, and feel of a technology is key to how children assess if the technology is creepy. In some instances, children were willing to look past other creepy signals if a technology had a charming appearance.
Mediating between signals and fear
Children referred to their parents as the most important factor in determining whether technologies were creepy or not.
One child noted that smartphones, laptops, and other consumer electronics were not creepy because their parents frequently used them without anxiety.
In contrast, another child expressed that consumer electronics had the potential to be creepy because his parents put a paper cover over their laptop camera to prevent intruders.
What does this all mean for parents/guardians and designers?
As a starting point for designing technologies children trust and enabling children to decide what to trust, we came up with a set of questions that both parents/guardians and designers can think about and discuss together with kids, such as:
● What information is okay for people to know about children? Do we think technology could deceive people? Why and how?
● What do we want a technology to look like? Do technologies that look and feel nice always act nice?
● Could technology ever replace people?
● What do you think about parent/guardian usage of technology? How does technology usage in parents affect children’s views of that relationship?
For a complete list, see our full paper.
Children today have core fears that are overlooked in the design process and
have the potential to be invoked by technology.
We believe that it is essential to understand more deeply children’s fears of technology and how they make sense of the digital world around them.
Full citation:
Yip, J., Sobel, K., Gao, X., Hishikawa, A.M., Lim, A., Meng, L., Ofiana, R.F., Park, J., & Hiniker, A. (2019). Laughing is scary, but farting is cute: A conceptual model of children’s perspectives of creepy technologies. In Proceedings of ACM SIGCHI Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2019).
