Digital Dangers: Sharenting and Beyond

You open your Facebook newsfeed and mindlessly scroll. You browse news from your favorite sports teams and pictures of cute dogs, but soon you notice that everywhere you look, you see parents posting about their kids. As a new parent, you’re confused and slightly worried. Will other parents judge you if you don’t share photos and stories about your children? Are you parenting correctly if you’re the only one not “sharenting”?

As the popularity of social media has grown throughout the last decade, the phenomenon of “sharenting” has grown with it. Sharenting refers to the recent trend of parents overusing social media platforms to share information about their kids, such as baby photos and news about their activities and whereabouts. Parents tend to share only the cutest pictures, funniest stories, and most impressive accomplishments of their children. The problems of sharenting, however, extend beyond comparison and expectations of perfection for children. Parents frequently engage in sharenting without the consent of their children and create an easily accessible and replicable digital footprint that can permanently damage a child.

Although parents often teach their children that the internet is a dangerous place and to not reveal their information online, those who post about their kids on public platforms are inadvertently revealing details about their children that can harm them. A study by the Australian government’s eSafety Commission revealed that around 50% of all images circulated on pedophilic networks were originally taken from social media sites. Along with this, children are a common victim of identity theft. Barclays, an investment bank based in Britain, has estimated that sharenting will result in over $879 million worth of data losses and be the primary cause of over two thirds of identity fraud facing youth by 2030. Parents often share their children’s birth dates, full names, and school addresses in their posts, along with seemingly irrelevant information such as their mother’s maiden name and names of pets, which can be used to answer security questions. Sharenting also can leave digital footprints that can be accessed in the future. For example, sensitive information such as diagnosis of mental or physical diseases and adoption status have the potential to lead to bullying in the future. Children are becoming increasingly connected on social media platforms with each other, and with their friends’ parents. All it would take to find and share such information is a simple scroll through someone’s profile.

Despite the implementation of measures to protect the privacy of children online, such as the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), they cannot protect any information revealed through sharenting. COPPA, for example, prohibits websites from using children’s data without parental consent, which is assumed when parents post on social media; implications for consent are buried in pages of privacy policies that are rarely ever read. Parental consent is clearly not the best way to gauge child consent, but since it is given on behalf of children, it is not feasible to create a legal framework that prevents dangerous oversharing. A realistic way to keep people safe would involve mandatory education of the dangers of social media. If social media websites were required to include compulsory education about the risks of posting online on their platforms, inadvertently risky sharing could be reduced. Even with such changes, the onus would still be on parents to understand the permanence and publicity of digital posts.

The dangers of social media, though, are not limited to children. Though seemingly consisting of thousands of fleeting posts and pictures, social media has a digital permanence that cannot be understated. Every post, picture, or tweet contributes to a digital identity followed by social media companies, external corporations that scrape data, or even online users that screenshot posts. Anything that is posted online is accessible, whether through middlemen that are your Facebook friends or Instagram followers or directly to the public. Because of this, people should do their best to limit access to their posts to people that they trust by making their social media accounts and posts as private as possible. Alternatively, secure platforms of information sharing such as group chats or Google photo albums should be considered. Though children are more frequently targets of stalking, data theft, and identity theft, nobody is safe from such threats. The safest assumption to make is that anyone can access the information you post online.

Many precautions must be taken before posting online, but especially about children. People should reflect on whether the post could potentially harm or embarrass themselves or their children in the future and always act with prudence. Sharing information about one’s children, and oneself, can be a healthy and fun way to connect with others, but in today’s digital world, it is of utmost importance that sharing is done in moderation and with proper precaution.