Children as Open Financial Data

Commentary

Parents see their children as priceless, but financial technology companies, or “Big Fintech,” are tracking them as valuable commodities.

It’s not human trafficking in the physical sense, but the implications are nearly as foreboding, and too few parents think much about the consequences of the latest log-in to an app other than the hassle of remembering passwords.

When we spend time worrying over our children’s safety—teaching them not to talk to strangers, monitoring what they do online, and thinking carefully about who has access to their personal information—do we think about the increasingly sophisticated technology-based infrastructure that is capturing seemingly harmless data to build out a database that is more comprehensive about our lives than simple spreadsheets?

Most families never see this danger coming because it is hidden in everyday (and often benign) online and financial transactions.

Each time we pay for summer camp, soccer registration, dance lessons, or school supplies online, we assume that we are simply completing a purchase. Instead, those innocent inputs increasingly create a multidimensional sketch of our lives, revealing far more about ourselves than we realize.

Accumulating this data online creates a very detailed profile that allows others to know where our kids go to school, what activities they do, and which doctors they visit. It even captures our family’s mundane routines.

Our kids are no longer customers and participants; they have become a financial product.

This information is incredibly valuable to Big Fintech, which profits from the data. The companies behind many of today’s payment apps and financial technology platforms market themselves as innovative alternatives to traditional financial institutions.

Their business model depends on collecting as much information as possible—often from unwitting consumers—and sharing it with networks of third-party data middlemen who find new ways to profit from what they learn.

And because they make life easier for parents navigating busy family schedules, few people consider the implications of these interactions or wittingly consent to lengthy, dense terms and conditions filled with legal jargon before logging in.

We’ve seen this scenario play out for years as Big Tech innovated while simultaneously collecting unprecedented amounts of personal data with little to no safeguards in place. Only after repeated scandals, lawsuits, and public outrage did policymakers begin holding these companies accountable. Recently, a New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $942 million after finding that its platforms harmed children and failed to adequately protect young users.

More legal judgments are forthcoming, and companies—including Big Fintech—need to think about how they leverage growth and data collection ahead of child safety and the eventual costs families will bear should no reasonable boundaries in cyberspace exist.

Rather than asking how little data they need to complete a transaction, many of these Fintech companies ask how much they can collect, retain, and share. Every payment for school supplies, youth sports, or music lessons becomes another opportunity to gather information about our families.

That information is valuable not because it helps process a payment, but because it helps build a detailed digital profile that can be monetized. What danger should we expect if these data are exposed, or if those companies suffer a breach?

Stolen personal information can be used for identity theft years before parents ever discover it. Pair it with other publicly available information, and criminals can use financial data to target families in scams, fraud, or harassment.

One can extol the utility and virtue of a free flow of public data and enthusiastically endorse technological innovation while also acknowledging that the push for fewer restrictions on how financial data are shared may be shortsighted and premature. In this information age, sophisticated actors and agents move data at hypersonic speeds.

Protecting our children requires staying one step ahead of new threats. Parents are the first and best line of defense in paying attention not only to what our kids do online but also to what happens every time we click “pay now.”

They also deserve transparency about who has access to our financial information, how long it is kept, and with whom it is shared. Our children should not be fodder for others’ financial gain.

If Big Fintech is building a business around our children’s data, it is time for parents and policymakers to revisit the digital fine print.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.