Gen Alpha

hen companies want to attract new customers, this is often read as Gen Z, people born between 1995 and 2012, but let’s for a moment put the lens on Gen Alpha, the kids born between 2011 and 2025.

These kids are also referred to as the Glass Generation as their glass-fronted devices will be their main medium of communication. Their toys are both physical and digital, and their presence on the internet is almost instant. In the United States, 92% of children aged two or younger have an online presence, according to security company AVG. This as Gen Alpha from the day they were born has been the subject of “sharenting” by their millennial parents. Sharenting is sharing pictures of your children on social media.

53 % of American parents (57% of moms, 48% of dads) with children under 18 years old say that they are “very concerned” about the privacy and security of pictures of their children, according to research from Wunderman Thompson. Because of this brands are starting to consider the implications for kids’ data. Amazon has created a “safe space in a walled garden” across the kid-friendly versions of its smart devices, and Facebook’s Messenger Kids tweaked its parental controls in February 2020 to help adults manage their child’s privacy on the app more easily, and updated its privacy policy to include more kid friendly language and illustrations.

In November 2020, Rego Payments introduced Mazoola, a new digital wallet app that is compliant with COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act) rules. A law which lawmakers are attempting to update as it is ca 20 years old, the new version could include a stipulation that would let parents erase the data that companies have on their kids and extend the age of those protected by the act from 13 to 15. Recently TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance, along with Google and YouTube, was fined for violating COPPA by selling young users’ data to third-party advertisers.