China’s Tencent Holdings has become the latest tech company to come up with a smart lamp with a hidden camera that uses artificial intelligence to detect when a child is studying. The product is called Little Lamp, and it can detect when a child is focusing on studying by detecting the pupils’ changes in size. The lamp also sends an alert to parents via WeChat, the popular messaging app, when a child has fallen asleep or is in a dangerous location.
An inexpensive smart lamp that monitors children’s studying habits is becoming popular in China, where it is marketed as a way to make the children study better. The lamp, which costs under $50, is a brightly glowing wheel that sits on a child’s desk. It is equipped with LEDs that track the child’s movements so that their study habits can be monitored.
What looks like a children’s desk lamp, behaves like a Amazon.com Inc. Alexa and comes with two surveillance cameras? China’s latest educational fad. The popularity of smart home lamps has skyrocketed since ByteDance Inc, the developer of the short video app TikTok, launched the $120 lamps in October. Chinese parents bought 10,000 devices in the first month. The product’s popularity prompted ByteDance to step up marketing and encourage competitors to market their own versions, while also testing the Chinese public’s tolerance for large cameras. The lights have two built-in cameras - one looking at the child, the other showing the child from above - so parents can follow their children remotely as they learn. Attached to each lamp is a smartphone-sized screen that uses artificial intelligence to predict mathematical problems and difficult words. Parents can hire a human tutor to digitally monitor their children during school hours. In addition to the basic version of the lamp, the $170 advanced model sends alerts and photos to parents when their children are careless. This version of the lamp was sold on major Chinese e-commerce platforms earlier this month. Ni Ying, a 36-year-old woman from Shanghai who bought a basic version of the lamp in March, paid another $350 for three teachers to remotely supervise her daughter’s homework for two hours a day for three months. It’s much more efficient: My daughter is doing her job and if she needs help, the teachers are there to help her, said Ms Ni, noting that this way she doesn’t have to keep an eye on her 10-year-old daughter all the time. I became less anxious about his homework, and the lamp improved our relationship. In just a few years, the video-sharing app TikTok has grown to rival the world’s most popular social media platforms. The WSJ reports on how Chinese startup ByteDance brought TikTok to the public’s attention and why it caught the attention of regulators. Video/illustration: Jaden Urby/WSJ The success of ByteDance’s smart lights shows how open the Chinese company is to technologies that promise an advantage in an increasingly competitive environment. Above all, surveillance penetrates much deeper into the daily lives of the Chinese than many Westerners would like. In recent years, Chinese schools have experimented with headbands that monitor children’s brainwave activity and concentration levels, uniforms for students that can track their location, and robots for kindergartens that monitor student attendance, teach, and analyze student behavior. However, ByteDance’s smart lights and remote learning service are the first time we have seen an education-related mass surveillance product in the homes and bedrooms of Chinese children, he said. Ted Chen, a Beijing-based education technology entrepreneur. ByteDance stated that there was a lot of misunderstanding in the community about the lamp. For example, remote monitoring can only be activated with the consent of the parents and the child. In March, the Chinese internet titan Tencent Holdings Ltd. has announced plans to launch a similar artificial intelligence-based homework lamp with the same features as the ByteDance product. The education technology race is unfolding in China, where tech giants are looking for new areas of growth despite legal restrictions and trying to win over increasingly wealthy and concerned parents. Wu Tong, a mother in the eastern city of Nanjing who bought the lamp for her three-year-old daughter, said Chinese parents have always felt strong pressure from society regarding their children’s education. Now that they are richer, they have more opportunities to take care of their children. Ms Wu, 30, said she had never thought about video surveillance when she bought the lamp. Instead, she says, she was drawn to the promise of warm light that casts no shadows, which is good for her book-loving daughter’s eyes. On Chinese social media, where the device is touted as a breath of fresh air for busy working parents, reviews are overwhelmingly positive, so much so that it’s hard to tell paid promoters from real customers. ByteDance, whose popular app for making short videos has been at the center of geopolitical friction between the US and China over the past year, has also launched a major marketing campaign. In a ByteDance commercial, the popular Chinese actress has fun following her son’s studies on a movie set. Another marketing video shows a Chinese migrant worker working on a construction site, separated from his family. In the commercial, a working-class daughter teaches her father the English word for family using a surveillance light. The company said it developed its smart lamp after months of consultation with about 2,000 Chinese parents and children. In Asia, parents are less obsessed with the idea of supervision, and parents often think that parental supervision is a good thing. Sunsun Lim, Professor at the Singapore University of Technology and Design, whose work focuses on technology and families. The problem for ByteDance, Tencent and other new entrants is that the focus of the regulatory authority in Beijing has shifted to education. In China’s wealthiest cities, authorities have begun limiting after-school programs because of inequality of opportunity for less affluent families. In late 2019, China’s Ministry of Education reprimanded schools for using third-party apps to collect students’ personal data.
Children sit in a classroom in Yongzhou, China, on May 11.
Photo: Str/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images The Chinese public is also increasingly aware of privacy. In March, certain features of the ByteDance lamp caused a stir on Chinese social media. According to one user, the app allows kids to upload videos of themselves. Another user complained that the lamp offered user profiles and videos of other children, often of the opposite sex, as study partners. At the time, ByteDance said that uploading videos requires parental permission and would be limited to homework videos. The company told the Journal that the light does not recommend children to other users and that the camera does not have real-time monitoring. Some Chinese media and parents have also criticized the idea of placing an interactive touch screen in front of children’s eyes while they learn, warning that the bulb would make children dependent on finding easy answers in the technology. Sun Chang, a 41-year-old official in Shanghai, overheard other parents discussing buying the ByteDance lamp. But Ms. Sun, whose son is in fifth grade, said she didn’t think it was a good idea to compromise her son’s privacy or encourage him to use technology more. Children also have a right to privacy, and parents should not take away that right, she added. -Qianwei Zhang and Zhao Yueling contributed to this article. Email Liza Lin at [email protected]
ByteDance and TikTok
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