Dataveillance through caring for children: Motherhood, kids’ smartwatches, and everyday surveillance in China by Jingyi Guo, p. 1

Dataveillance through caring for children: motherhood, kids’ smartwatches, and everyday surveillance in China

Here I explore the advertising discourse of kids’ smartwatches in China that normalizes dataveillance towards children from the perspective of feminist surveillance studies. I particularly pay attention to a brand named IMOO which occupies the largest market share in China’s kids’ smartwatch market. Focusing on practices of the “quantified child” promoted by the commercials of IMOO kids’ smartwatches and in dialogue with previous scholarship on the datafied child, I examine

intimate surveillance in mothers’ care for their children via the smartwatches;
self-surveillance in children’s consumption and usage of the smartwatches; and
social surveillance in children’s social interactions with peer groups with the smartwatches.

Employing an intersectional critical feminist approach to interrogate everyday surveillance, my argument is that IMOO kids’ smartwatches gain success in the heteropatriarchal technology market in China as it promotes surveillance culture by pandering to mothers’ desire and the imperative to care for their children, consolidating fathers’ domestic masculinity as breadwinners, and enforcing gendered discipline of girls.

“We provide parents with all-around peace of mind, and give children healthier bodies and dream-like experiences.”

These words come from a leaflet marketing IMOO kids’ smartwatches in China in early 2022. The sales pitch both promises a multi-faceted reassurance for parents (“all-around peace of mind”), and emphasizes benefits to children: “healthier bodies” and “dream-like experiences”. In the leaflet, the kids’ smartwatch appears very similar to a smartphone, with functions such as step-counting, photo-taking, video-calling, and even digital platforms for music-listening and mobile payment. In their daily lives, children wearing IMOO kids’ smartwatches can chat with friends, share photos, and see peers’ updates by using MiniChat installed exclusively in IMOO smartwatches. Meanwhile, parents can also call their children, track the child’s location and health status, and limit the child’s usage of the smartwatch through a mobile application designed by IMOO (see Liu, Zhang, and Lu, 2024). But what features make the smartwatch a technology specifically for children? How does it embody and possibly influence ideas about childhood and parent/child relationships in contemporary China? Moreover, how do children’ smartwatch advertisements rationalize data-based surveillance of children and continue market expansion?

Here I examine how dataveillance towards children is justified by analyzing the advertising discourse of kids’ smartwatches in China. I particularly pay attention to narratives promoting the “quantified child” in kids’ smartwatch advertisements offered by the brand IMOO. Meaning “little genius” in Chinese, IMOO focuses on producing smart devices for children. According to industry-analysis reports, China’s domestic market for kids’ smartwatches grew twofold between 2019 and 2022 (Asia Financial, 2022); moreover, China held a dominant position in the global kids’ smartwatch market, accounting for 62% of global shipments in 2019 (Counterpoint, 2020). IMOO occupies the largest market share in China’s kids’ smartwatch market compared to other Chinese tech giants such as Huawei or Xiaomi, which also produce smartwatches for children (Counterpoint, 2023). The silent but dominant growth of IMOO has been accompanied by ideologically-infused sales discourses about safety, parenting, and data-based surveillance.


On its website, IMOO markets that the location-tracking function in the kids’ smartwatches can help parents track their children’s location—even precise to the exact floor in a building: “In an apartment complex, you can see what’s going on with your child at a glance” and ”At a mall, you know which store your child has been to."

The concept of the “quantified child” refers to the technological monitoring of children’s daily activities that generate detailed data about them (Lupton & Williamson, 2017; Mascheroni & Holloway, 2019; Smith, 2017; Willson, 2019). Accompanying this trend is the assumption that data becomes “a regular currency for citizens to pay for [convenient] communication services” (van Dijck, 2014, p. 197-198); in this case, children are framed as promising data objects who can be molded into “future citizens and desiring consumers.” (Willson, 2019, p. 634) The functions of IMOO kids’ smartwatches illustrate a definition of the “quantified child.” For example, beyond the basic function of phone calls or video calls between children and their parents, smartwatches also include features such as real-time location tracking, heart-rate, and body-temperature monitoring, and even emotion recognition. Considering these features together, a major selling point for kids’ smartwatches is that they will help parents protect and care for their children and ensure a happy childhood.

However, the ways that technology industries and other stakeholders collect, process, and monetize data remain a black box, in fact leading to social problems that contribute to what Shoshana Zuboff has termed “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff, 2019). Monetizing children’s precious, even “priceless” (Zelizer, 1994) status in modern society makes the topic of dataveillance of children particularly relevant in academic and public discussions. Despite the promise of empowering and protecting children, kids’ smartwatches ironically place Chinese children at center of emerging and unknown risks as more data about and from them enters the technology industry’s fast market expansion. In the “315 Evening Gala” in 2022, which coincides with World Consumer Rights Day on March 15, China Media Group exposed specific problems deriving from kids’ smartwatches, including location data leakage and camera and microphone hacking (CGTN, 2022). The reciprocal or symbiotic relation between the market and the party-state in China’s Internet control (Hou, 2020) adds more complexities to the consequences of this surveillance technology’s market expansion, especially in areas such as public opinion monitoring (Hou, 2017) or sentiment analysis (Wu, 2020), two specific projects on which government agencies have been collaborating with big data companies.

In particular, I am drawing on two groups of literature: the modernization of childhood—with a focus on relations between children, mothers, commercial culture, and media technologies—and feminist surveillance studies. I situate the paper’s central concept of the “quantified child” alongside the work of scholars such as Deborah Lupton, Ben Williamson, and Michele Willson. As a research method I employ critical discourse analysis, which uncovers political-economic and gendered power dynamics in the production of advertising texts (Fairclough, 2013). The resulting analysis of kids’ smartwatch advertisements articulates how IMOO commercial discourse depicts three layers of surveillance embedded in children’s everyday use of smartwatches—intimate surveillance, self-surveillance, and social surveillance—as identified by Lupton and Williamson (2017). Overall, I argue that IMOO kids’ smartwatches gain success in the heteropatriarchal technology market in China that has been promoting surveillance culture by pandering to mothers’ desire and the imperative to care for their children, consolidating fathers’ domestic masculinity as breadwinners, and enforcing gendered discipline of girls. Finally, I consider the implications of this study for understanding children, gender, and everyday surveillance in Chinese society and beyond.

Literature review

Modernization of childhood, commercial culture, and media

The meaning of “child” or the idea of “valuing children” is socially constructed and shaped by the larger trends of modernization. In the Middle Ages, children in the West were perceived as adults on a small scale (Cunningham, 2005). It was in fact quite common for children to work as laborers or be exposed to topics of a mature nature, like sex (Ariès, 1962). However, a shift in adults’ conceptualization of children took place from the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, in large part due to the development of industrialization, compulsory education, and the primacy of the nuclear family (Ariès, 1962; Cunningham, 2005). Children became economically worthless and emotionally priceless as their unique personalities and abilities were increasingly valued by parents in heterosexual families with gendered divisions of labor (Zelizer, 1994; May, 1988; de la Parra Fernández, 2021). On the other hand, the growth of commercial culture also played a significant role in the conceptualization of children. Along with celebrating children’s uniqueness, advertisers gradually discovered children’s potential for exchange value; in particular, they could be used as a symbol in advertising that targeted parents. For example, advertisers produced clubs to “bond children in exclusive brand communities” (Asquith, 2014, p. 29) to promote brand loyalty. Children, positioned as consumers with free agency, could further influence family purchases (Jacobson, 2004). Cross (2010) argues that children’s consumption should be regarded as “valves of adult desires” (p. 17) and understood in dynamic association with the parent/child relationships; In this context, adults would view children as either “innocents who must be protected from the market” (p. 18) or “recipients of parental love through consumer spending” (p. 18).

The emphasis on treasuring children in contemporary Chinese society is also inseparable from the modernization and economic transformation that took place in the twentieth century. Historically, filial piety, or the idea that children are subordinate minors who unconditionally follow the directives of their elders, had long ruled the Chinese view of children (Liu, 2016). This idea is accompanied by preference for sons especially in rural society, where sons are entitled to stay with their parents and inherit family property yet daughters become outsiders to their natal families upon marriage (Feldman et al., 2007). In the 1920s, with the rapid spread of democratic and European scientific thought in Republican China, the centrality of children started to “both underwrite and [be] underwritten by a new culture industry that depends on the children’s market as a major source of revenue” (Jones, 2002, p. 709). The idea of valuing children became more closely associated with the market and commercial culture after China’s economic liberalization in the 1980s. The one-child policy launched in the same period further focused families’ resources on the development and well-being of their only child. This trend has implications for many aspects of Chinese social life, including marketing, given that more families are devoting time and resources to optimize their children’s opportunities in life (Meng, 2020) at the same time that children can influence family consumption by making demands on their parents (Westwood, 2013). As a result, Chinese parents, especially middle-class mothers, have been increasingly encouraged to privilege childrearing and take on more labor in both traditional and digital parenting (Peng, 2022; Zhang, Sun, & Ding, 2023).

In regard to media, Neil Postman (1982) made a famous claim in that television leads to the disappearance of childhood because it eliminates the distinctions between childhood and adulthood: “it is in its nature to homogenize mentalities” (p. 118). Television especially does this by showing emotive visual imagery that does not require any logical analysis (e.g., in animated comic strips, soap operas, news shows). Postman’s arguments echo common social concerns or “moral panics” about children’ media use. Besides television, comic books, video games, and the Internet have been regarded as threatening youth (e.g., Barker, 1984; Szablewicz, 2010), due to such problems as violent media content and potential addiction. Such moral panics, though criticized as “unreasonably extrapolating from particular instances of (mis)behavior to a larger threat” (Condis & Stanfill, 2011, p. 971), then justify parental or institutional interventions in children’s media use. Recent research notices that smart devices for children appeal to parental desires to be good parents and raise the ideal child (Willson, 2019). CCTV cameras at home (Liu, 2024), child-rearing robots (Yuan & Zhu, 2021), smart lamps (Lim & Wang, 2024), and kids’ smartwatches are several examples in contemporary Chinese society. Scholarly discussions have paid attention to how these technologies shape familial relationships and gendered inequalities in parenting, yet the privacy and surveillance issues involved in these interventions into childhood are largely neglected.

Situating the “quantified child” in feminist surveillance studies

The central concept of this paper, the quantified child, refers to a modern trend whereby children become the objects of monitoring devices that track their data in everyday technological interactions (Lupton & Williamson, 2017; Mascheroni & Holloway, 2019; Smith, 2017; Willson, 2019). The popularity of wearable technologies designed for children, such as kids’ smartwatches and fitbits, along with parental sharing of children’s (ultrasound) photos and school analytics, all lead to the datafication of children’s everyday lives from in utero through to the school years (Mascheroni & Holloway, 2019). Subtly different from a similar concept of ‘the quantified self,’ which refers to people using technologies to receive data about themselves through self-tracking (De Moya & Pallud, 2020), the quantified child implies that children are seldom regarded as “responsible agents” (p. 628) as “the management of their well-being is transferred in large part to parents, society, and the state” (Willson, 2019, p. 628). While companies promote monitoring devices as useful tools to keep children safe and assist good parenting (Simpson, 2014), scholars, regulators, and news media have criticized practices related to the quantified child for bringing potential risks of surveillance to children’s privacy both online and offline. For instance, the German Telecoms regulator banned kids’ smartwatches in 2017 out of worries about privacy invasion in GPS tracking and listening functions (BBC, 2017). Moreover, researchers such as Lupton and Williamson (2017) have been concerned about the trend that continuing dataveillance displaces children’s voices and participation in protecting their digital rights.

In this study, I take up feminist surveillance studies as an analytic for tracking the construction of the quantified child by IMOO smartwatches. According to Dubrofsky and Magnet (2015), feminist surveillance studies employ an intersectional critical feminist approach to interrogate “what constitutes surveillance, who is scrutinized, why, and at what cost” (p. 15) in relation to social inequalities and discrimination. I adopt the theoretical perspective of feminist surveillance studies in my research for two primary reasons. First, according to Gill (2019), surveillance is a feminist issue in that it is shaped by “a sensibility in which extracting and producing value from the body is central” (p. 158). Connecting feminist media studies’ work on bodies and “the politics of looking” (p. 10) to surveillance scholarship, Dubrofsky and Magnet (2015) highlight surveillance studies’ growing attention to the “data body” especially among vulnerable communities (see, for example, Puar, 2007). In the case of kids’ smartwatches, children’s biological information is a major source for data collection and exploitation. On top of that, surveillance relates to systematic discrimination and discipline in that it always “[classify] some bodies as normative and legal, and some as illegal and out of bounds” (Nakamura, 2015, p. 221), raising questions into the work of norms (e.g., gender norms) in heteronormative surveillance practices (Kafer & Grinberg, 2019). Second, as I will show in the analysis, discourse often used to rationalize surveillance in kids’ smartwatches includes “care for the kids.” However, feminist researchers have long critiqued cultural and material constructions of “care” as unpaid or underpaid women’s work that is emotionally oriented (Abu-Laban, 2015). It is thus necessary to tease out the logic of power and control masked by “care” discourse that often includes assumptions about mothers’ roles in engaging in practices of surveillance framed as necessary to maintain children’s safety. Taken together, the perspective of feminist surveillance studies guides me to interrogate both the gendered regime of parental care and the gendered discipline of girls implied in IMOO’s advertising.

The production and popularity of child-rearing technologies in China, including kids’ smartwatches, need to be understood in connection with the heteropatriarchal norms upheld by the state and the technology market in the past decade. Since China’s President Xi Jinping took the Presidency in 2013, his heteropatriarchal love for his own family as a loving father and for the family-nation as a paternalistic leader has been promoted by Chinese media with its nationalist propaganda about China’s rise in global politics and economy (Zhang, 2022). Such a heteropatriarchal love has implications for both individual citizens and the consumer market. At the individual level, Xi’s government has been encouraging family building, heterosexual marriage, and birthrate (Ye, 2023). For instance, in 2021, the Chinese authority introduced the three-child policy to encourage couples to have more children (Chinese Central Government, 2021). At the market level, technologies for digital parenting and education with surveillance functions proliferate, using justifications such as “keeping children safe” or “improving kids’ learning efficiency.” But, as previous studies note, these smart technologies place increasing burdens on women because the historically gendered division of labor in parenting persists (Peng, 2022), multiple masculinities are woven into technological design (Yuan & Zhu, 2021), and the male producer/female consumer binary is reinforced in the commercialization of motherhood (Duffy, 2016; Zhang, Sun, & Ding, 2023). Furthermore, these surveillance technologies are part of China’s mass surveillance project, in which tech giants collaborate with the government to combine visible surveillance devices with invisible Big-Data-driven information systems (Liang et al., 2018). In this environment, small and medium enterprises produce intrusive surveillance devices with functions beyond the scope of social management (Huang & Tsai, 2022). Thus, by examining ideas about childhood, parenting, and gender in IMOO’s commercials, we are able to understand how the brand conceals the normalization of surveillance, in which case people become more accepting of widespread surveillance (Selinger & Rhee, 2021). In that way, something like a kid’s smartwatch strengthens a paternalistic and heteropatriarchal surveillance culture whilst weakening the autonomy of the children who are surveilled.

Research data and methods

The empirical basis for my research was 16 advertising videos released for IMOO from 2015, when the brand launched its first kids’ smartwatch, to 2022. To search for IMOO’s commercials, I employed purposive sampling and searched mainstream video platforms for keywords (in Chinese) including “IMOO kids’ smartwatches”, “IMOO”, and “advertising of kids’ smartwatches”. After excluding videos with duplicate content, I obtained 16 commercials for IMOO kids’ smartwatches.[1] To contextualize my analysis, I also referred to news pieces, leaflets, and public documents that discussed the brand. These supporting materials allowed me to study the political-economic dynamics and integrative marketing and branding strategies behind the advertising texts.

I then conducted a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of the 16 advertising videos. I took extensive notes of both verbal and visual materials, including the words that appeared in advertising as well as the visual images, including the characters’ appearance and behavior. I follow Fairclough’s (2013) approach to CDA, which regards discourses as constituted by “social practice, discoursal practice (text production, distribution and consumption), and texts” (p. 59); furthermore, CDA examines their interrelations in the working of “power differences and inequalities” (p. 26) that contributes to the production of ideology. In this way, I analyzed details in the advertisements such as narrative structures and interrelations between verbal and visual symbols. At the same time, I explored the socio-economic contexts related to the making and storytelling of the commercials of IMOO kids’ smartwatches.

Locating my methodology within feminist media studies, I conducted a close reading of IMOO’s advertising texts to examine how discursive practices in the brand’s commercials relate to heteropatriarchal culture and the political economy in contemporary China. With a select sample of advertising texts, my research findings are exploratory rather than definitive. Despite this, I expect the present study to enrich discussions about everyday surveillance in China from a feminist perspective.