In this reappraisal of public health and health promotion in contemporary societies, Deborah Lupton explores public health and health promotion using contemp

Mobile and wearable digital devices and related Web 2.0 apps and social media tools offer new ways of monitoring, measuring and representing the human body. They are capable of producing detailed biometric data that may be collected by individuals and then shared with others. Health promoters, like many medical and public health professionals, have been eager to seize the opportunities they perceive for using what have been dubbed ‘mHealth’ (‘mobile health’) technologies to promote the public’s health. These technologies are also increasingly used by lay people outside the professional sphere of health promotion as part of voluntary self-tracking strategies (referred to by some as the ‘quantified self’). In response to the overwhelmingly positive approach evident in the health promotion and self-tracking literature, this article adopts a critical sociological perspective to identify some of the social and cultural meanings of self-tracking practices via digital devices. Following an overview of the technologies currently available for such purposes, I move on to discuss how they may contribute to concepts of health, embodiment and identity. The discussion focuses particularly on how these technologies promote techno-utopian, enhancement and healthist discourses, and the privileging of the visual and metric in representing the body via these devices.

Children are becoming the objects of a multitude of monitoring devices that generate detailed data about them, and critical data researchers and privacy advocates are only just beginning to direct attention to these practices. In this article, we provide an overview and critique of these varied forms of datafication and dataveillance of children, from in utero through to the school years. Our approach is informed by recent calls for research on children’s rights in the digital age that examines the conditions that give rise to children’s needs and guide provision of resources necessary for development to their full potential, the array of specific harms they may encounter and the significance of and particular opportunities to participate in matters that affect their wellbeing and enable them to play an active part in society. There remains little evidence that specific instruments to safeguard children’s rights in relation to dataveillance have been developed or implemented, and further attention needs to be paid to these issues.

The concept of self-tracking has recently begun to emerge in discussions of ways in which people can record specific features of their lives, often using digital technologies, to monitor, evaluate and optimize themselves. There is evidence that the personal data that are generated by the digital surveillance of individuals (dataveillance) are now used by a range of actors and agencies in diverse contexts. This paper examines the ‘function creep’ of self-tracking by outlining five modes that have emerged: private, communal, pushed, imposed and exploited. The analysis draws upon theoretical perspectives on concepts of selfhood, citizenship, dataveillance and the global digital data economy in discussing the wider socio-cultural implications of the emergence and development of these modes of self-tracking.