The Selective Surveillance of Our Smallest Citizens
CASE A: The AI Toy Scandal Senator Maggie Hassan's letter to Bondu, an AI-powered conversational toy company, expresses 'devastation' over the exposure of children's chat transcripts and personal data. Per Axios, Bondu's portal inadvertently made data publicly accessible, affecting 'tens of thousands of children.' The framing emphasizes the unique vulnerability of 'children between the ages of
three and nine years old' and the potential for identity theft or exploitation. The Senate's Joint Economic Committee, a body traditionally focused on broad economic trends, is now actively scrutinizing the niche market of AI toys, demonstrating a reactive approach to technological risks once they manifest as public breaches. The company, Bondu, claims 'industry-standard safeguards' and 'strictly
limited' access to data by 'authorized core team members' (Bondu website, undated). The investigation targets technical failures and corporate accountability, asking specific questions about system build and detection of flaws. CASE B: The Uninterrogated Surveillance of Childhood Contrast this with the long-standing, widespread collection of children's data by tech giants that remains largely
unaddressed by similar congressional interventions. For example, Google and YouTube were fined $170 million in 2019 for violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) by collecting personal information from children without parental consent to target them with ads (FTC, 2019). Despite this finding, the underlying business model of data harvesting from minors by platforms like