Conference Program

The proliferation of connected, voice-responsive, and algorithmically driven toys is profoundly reshaping children's earliest encounters with digital technologies. The Internet of Toys (IoToys), a subset of the broader Internet of Things, embeds data collection and platform logic into objects traditionally associated with play, care, and imaginative development (Mascheroni & Holloway, 2019). This paper presents a theoretical framework for examining the intersection of anthropomorphization, datafication, and children's digital rights within this emerging landscape (Marangi, 2026).

The anthropomorphic design of smart toys, devices engineered to simulate emotional responsiveness, personality, and conversational agency, operates as a structural mechanism that erodes children's critical distance toward data-extractive systems. When toys appear to listen, respond, and remember, the boundaries between play and surveillance dissolve in ways that children, and often their caregivers, are ill-equipped to recognize or contest (Raffaghelli, 2022). Children's digital biographies now begin well before preschool, as algorithmically driven interfaces embed platform logics into intimate family routines, generating asymmetries of power that existing regulatory frameworks have yet to adequately address.

Building on the concept of the child data citizen (Barassi, 2021), the framework situates IoToys within the governance gaps that persist despite normative advances represented by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the GDPR, and the EU Digital Services Act. Legal protection alone, however, remains insufficient. The most urgent intervention lies at the level of educational mediation and specifically in the formation of the adults who share children's earliest digital experiences: parents, early childhood educators, and teachers working in the 0–6 age range (Livingstone & Blum-Ross, 2020).

In this perspective, the media education framework, in its most current formulation (Rivoltella, 2020), emerges not as a supplementary skill but as a foundational professional competence for all those who live or work in proximity to early childhood. Such adults must develop an ethical, not merely technical, orientation toward the digital revolution (Adamoli, 2020), and cultivate the capacity to recognize anthropomorphic design strategies, understand datafication dynamics, and engage children in age-appropriate forms of critical reflection on their relationships with connected objects (Mascheroni, 2025). This requires rethinking the very concept of digital competence in light of the transformations brought about by AI, reframing it as an increasingly relational and critical disposition (Ranieri, 2024) that encompasses the ability to decode the affective and ideological dimensions embedded in smart technologies, and to support children in developing genuine agency within, rather than mere exposure to, digital ecosystems (Livingstone & Sefton-Green, 2025). Such a reframing places the quality of adult-child mediation, rather than the device itself, at the center of any meaningful approach to children's digital rights.