While living in France last spring, I went to the park one chilly evening with the lady who was hosting me. We were watching her three-year-old daughter play on the playground with other young children, when my hostess suddenly gasped.
“What?” I asked.
She indicated another little girl on the playground, perhaps seven or eight years old. “That’s the daughter of an Instagram influencer I follow!” she said, laughing. “I knew they moved here recently, but I didn’t expect to see her family.”
My hostess found this discovery very charming, but I was disconcerted. Of course, my hostess was no harm to this influencer’s family; she simply found it fun to recognize someone on the playground from the internet, as if she were seeing a celebrity on the street.
But how many other adults with far less pure intentions might also recognize this child? How many other adults, like my host family, knew what she looked like, her name, and the city in which she lived? It doesn’t seem unlikely that this young girl’s interests, favorite foods, and hobbies were also public knowledge to tens of thousands of Instagram users.
Enter the problem of “sharenting”: sharing and parenting. A 2021 Security survey found that more than 75% of American parents have shared some details about their children online, including photos, videos, names, and personality traits. Only 24% of parents ask their children’s permission before posting them online. Likewise, 32% of teenagers reported that a parent has shared images or videos of them online even after the teen asked the parent to refrain.
Sharing personal information online is never without risk. Of course, parents who post their children’s schools, names of sports teams or extracurricular activities, or even information about where they live could put themselves or their children in serious danger from predators and stalkers. A street sign in the background of a photo and photo of a school uniform with a logo already give too much information about the regular whereabouts of a child. Anyone could extrapolate unimaginable amounts of information about these children from what is readily available online, which can lead to identity theft or worse.
All this doesn’t even include the growing number of social media influencers who use their children as regular sources of content. After all, videos and photos of cute children will always garner attention – much of it harmless, but certainly not all. And these parenting influencers often begin filming (and often staging) their children’s activities when they are toddlers or infants, robbing them of the ability to knowingly consent to having an online presence.
Of course, parents who do this are a minority. Many parents have private social media profiles, so not just anyone can see their posts. But only 22% of parents report that they personally know 100% of their followers (those who can see their posts of their children) from real life interactions, meaning that almost 80% of parents on social media have followers whom they’ve never met. Most of the followers of any social media user are casual acquaintances, people you took college classes with or met at a conference. Who’s to say that these people are trustworthy, no matter how many mutual commonalities you share?
In the age of generative AI, the risks of sharenting are greater than ever before. Everything that lives on the internet has the potential to be used to train AI models, meaning that your child’s likeness and even voice can be fed to AI, where it can be used for nefarious purposes.
The internet is vast, yes, and your private social media posts may not go anywhere. But the internet is also forever. Do we as parents, grandparents, and other caring adults need to consider removing all content about the children we love from our social media pages – at least, until those children are old enough to consent to having an online presence?
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Image credit: Unsplash
