“Making the decision to have a child – it is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.”
This quote from the teacher and author Elizabeth Stone has always stuck with me. It might seem sweet, simplistic, even saccharine; but it’s the closest and most accurate example of the way it feels – the way it felt, for me – sending my children off into the world to nursery (and, later, school).
I was fortunate that the local childcare provider I chose for my kids was loving, warm and sent me daily updates to let me know what they were doing, while I was wracked with inevitable and crushing mother-guilt at work.
“Today, your child has enjoyed playing in the sandpit. He tried eating some sand and didn’t like it very much!” I read that while calculating whether or not I was going to make it to pick-up on time, or risk a “£10 every 10 minutes” fine for arriving after 6pm. “Today, we practiced ‘gentle hands’ and learned to say together: “No hitting!”” made me laugh, when I probably should have frowned. “Today, we had lots of fun doing a lentil activity! Your child tried to eat the lentils. I said: “Stop – we don’t eat uncooked lentils!’ He looked away, ignored me and ate the lentils.”
Other carers I quizzed on their nursery experiences sent me similar, misty-eyed anecdotes of “learning observations”, photo montages and key workers on nickname-terms with parents. That’s how important nurseries are to the users: mums, dads, grandparents, carers, kids. It’s less a transactional relationship (though the costs can be astronomical, even crippling – being able to send a child to a private nursery at all in the UK is still an immense privilege) and more an extension of your family. After all, you’re allowing strangers to dress, wash, feed, teach, nap, toilet train and keep “your heart” safe for you, in absentia. It’s an enormous responsibility – a bond not only of trust, but love.
Which is precisely why I felt myself struck by an immediate and nauseating sense of horror, the moment I heard about the Kido nursery cyber hack.
The details are terrifying: the photographs, names and addresses of around 8,000 children have been stolen from the London-based nursery chain by online hacking group “Radiant” – and are being used to demand ransom money, according to the BBC. The pictures and profiles of 10 of the affected children have already been published on their darknet website.
When I watched the broadcaster’s report on the scandal this morning, one detail was particularly disturbing: one of the hackers told the BBC they “didn’t care” about the information they’d stolen from parents – all they cared about was the money. I find this singularly depressing, following on the coat-tails of a wider, even bleaker global malaise that proves that far too many powerful men – politicians, presidents, prime ministers, programmers – simply don’t care about children. Just look at Gaza and the West Bank.
In a hyper-local sense, away from the grotesque and very real horrors of war, this is every parent’s worst nightmare; a microcosmic example of our atavistic drive to do one thing above all else: keep our children safe from harm. Sending your offspring to nursery is an extension of that instinct. Someone has stolen that essential sense of safety from those parents.
With it, a plethora of unthinkables: the kind of people who frequent the unsavoury reaches of the dark web (when most of us wouldn’t have the first clue how to find it), having access to biographical information about your child. Their face, their location, their safeguarding notes; plus, information about your whereabouts and workplace, where you live, when you are home – and away. I am just one of many worried parents who chooses to track our children via apps and AirTags. The idea that someone with nefarious intent might also know where they are, is horrifying.
Then, there’s the added concern about unsafe guardians. Women who have fled domestic abuse situations; who have no contact with a violent ex-partner – because it simply isn’t safe. What if their children’s whereabouts (and their own) are also displayed on the dark web?
And the hackers, as they’ve already said, “don’t care”. BBC News reported that when it challenged the criminals over using highly sensitive data about children to extort from a nursery, they insisted they “weren’t asking for an enormous amount” and “deserve some compensation for our pentest” (that is to say: a “penetration test” – the term for when ethical hackers are hired to assess the security of an organisation in a controlled and professional way).
There is nothing ethical about using children as collateral for your own greed. Dress it up however you like: it’s still a selfish, moronic and shameful breach of privacy.
It is particularly ironic that news of this egregious hack comes on the same day we are learning about Labour’s unrolling of digital ID cards, a move – Keir Starmer claims – that will force people to prove their right to work in the UK and so prevent people making the risky journey here on small boats; that will simultaneously win support from the uninquisitive: those who think Reform UK is the answer to their prayers, while “reducing the asylum backlog”.
What I worry about isn’t so much that we have a record of that data – but what those in charge are prepared to do to protect it. How tightly they’re willing to control its access. How prepared they are for slip-ups.
How they’ll prevent, at all costs, the kind of people who don’t give a s**t about putting the most vulnerable members of our society – our children – at risk on the dark net for extra cash, getting hold of it too. Looking at the world as it is right now, I’m not sure anyone “cares” enough to stop that from happening. Are you?
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