A mum rushes online to buy a last-minute World Book Day outfit for her daughter, and sees an array of outfits recommended to her, priced around L19. A worried dad browses a neighbourhood website absent-mindedly, when he notices A-level tutoring adverts dotted around his screen. Indeed, he has been worrying about his son's progress lately! Semi-jokingly, he muses whether his relentless online searching has perhaps begun to feed algorithmic environments enough for adverts to feel so personal, and so relevant. A perplexed grandma hands over a primary aged kid to his parents at the end of a lovely day. She reports that she has seen her grandchild's YouTube watching auto-play some potentially problematic content. Parents provide rushed consent through form-signing, to newer apps at nurseries, childminders, and of course, schools. These promise to enhance their children's experiences and parents’ overviews of their children.

These are snapshots from the UK. As I raise my children in the South East of the UK, while these stories are picked out from the many I have personally heard at school gates, on WhatsApp group chats, or at family gatherings – they are far from unique. But also, the stories have many differences. First, there are diverse types of invisible, under-the-bonnet, rules of conditionality – algorithms – involved in each of these cases, governed by an if– then logic (Bucher, 2018). These rules are fuzzy, and, as Gillespie (2014) suggests, ‘there may be something in the end impenetrable about algorithms’ (p 192). But, they also work differently. Spotify, Twitter, Amazon, or Google Search outcomes operate on diverse logics of algorithmic recommendation, something Kotliar (2021) calls ‘choice-inducing algorithms’. They encompass various relationship types, such as dyadic versus one-directional, offline versus online only, and exhibit distinct cultures of usage. And, also, these stories come from different families, with a range of different needs and circumstances. Together, people and algorithms interact in mutually shaped relationships (see here Siles's 2023 account of the mutual domestication of users and algorithms).

But, the relationships between parents and algorithms in the snapshots shared previously, are not equal relationships, in terms of power. What these stories share, fundamentally, is the metrification of social action (Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier, 2013) – or, datafication.