Here is the full transcript of privacy scholar Priya Kumar’s talk titled “How To Protect Children’s Privacy Online” at TEDxPSU 2024 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
The Rise of Sharenting
Close your eyes and picture these scenes: a newborn swaddled in a parent’s arms, a kindergartner posing on the first day of school. These are moments of snapshot significance, where parents pull out their cameras, or nowadays their smartphones, and mark the occasion with a photo. For decades, these photos went into albums, frames, or shoeboxes. Now parents regularly post them on Facebook, Instagram, and other social media.
Indeed, 82% of U.S. parents who use social media have posted about their children online, according to the Pew Research Center. As this kind of posting has become more prevalent, journalists and scholars have expressed concerns about how such posting might affect children’s privacy. One Washington Post headline even wondered if such posting means the end of privacy for our children. This framing of privacy is familiar.
A new device, system, or app gains popularity, and public discourse cautions that it raises privacy concerns. The technology becomes normalized, and critics say goodbye to privacy. My research seeks to change the terms of this debate. Instead of asking whether privacy exists, I explore how privacy works when digital technologies are intertwined with everyday life.
Personal Experience and Research Inspiration
Specifically, I study how society frames certain kinds of technology use as problematic, and who society holds responsible for addressing such problems. My interest in the topic of families, technology use, and privacy began back in spring 2013, when I was a master’s student. One day, I took a break from doing homework and logged onto Facebook.
I saw a post from a friend I hadn’t seen in a few years. Her post had two images. The first was a photo of my friend and her husband beaming, holding a sign that said “we’re pregnant.” The second was an annotated sonogram announcing the due date.
I’d started seeing a lot of pregnancy announcements at the time, but this one was different. My friend also included a link to a blog where she chronicled the four years she spent struggling to conceive. I spent the next 45 minutes reading the personal and painful journey my friend had taken, which included surgery and a miscarriage.
I was struck by the fact that she felt comfortable posting such personal detail on a blog that was publicly available. But I could also feel how writing the blog had helped her cope with the experience. This got me thinking about how parents, and people wanting to become parents, balance privacy with their desire to share information online.
The Digital Footprint Dilemma
I found the posting of sonograms especially fascinating. Here was a future child who existed online before they were even born. It struck me that this next generation of children was going to have a very different experience of social media compared to people like me.
For context, I joined Facebook in July 2005 at my college orientation. So I’ve spent my entire adult life managing my digital footprint and being told that’s something I should do. But today’s children won’t get to decide how to create their digital footprints.
Their parents will make those choices for them years before they can even sign up for their own accounts. In other words, people are now inheriting their digital footprints rather than creating them from scratch like I did. I wondered whether parents were thinking about this and how they were grappling with it.
Research Methodology
So I joined a research team at the University of Michigan and turned these questions into a research project. Our team interviewed 102 parents across the U.S. about how they use social media. We recruited participants through flyers in local daycares, doctor’s offices, and churches, as well as posts on online parenting forums and listservs.
We interviewed 64 fathers and 38 mothers. Most were married, but 14 identified as separated, divorced, or widowed. We found that our participants took several steps to manage their children’s digital identities.
First, parents had to determine what they felt was appropriate to post online about their children and discuss this with their partner. This was fairly straightforward when partners had similar preferences, but as you can imagine, it was harder when partners differed in what they felt was appropriate.
Managing Children’s Digital Identities
It was also harder for some of the divorced parents we talked to since some had tensions with their former partner. Once parents were on the same page about child-related posting, they had to communicate their preferences to friends and family. Some developed more formal rules or policies, while others offered more general guidance, like asking people to be cautious when posting about their children online or asking them to adjust their privacy settings so that any posts about children wouldn’t be publicly visible.
This could be another source of tension if people didn’t listen or if someone’s posts went against one parent’s preferences but not the others. Finally, parents also had to manage their own posting across different social media platforms. Some felt that platforms like Facebook and what used to be called Twitter were too public, so they shared photos elsewhere, like through group chats or file-sharing platforms like Dropbox.
Gender Dynamics in Digital Footprint Management
As part of our analysis, our team also examined who did this work. We found that mothers primarily took on these roles and managed the process. This aligns with previous research on family photography that found that mothers were the ones who managed family photo collections.
It also aligns with gendered patterns of household labor more broadly. Given this, I wondered what tensions mothers in particular faced when managing their children’s digital footprints. I found that the mothers we interviewed really grappled with the tension between representing their identity as a mother in their social media posts and thinking about how their children might react to their posts in the future.
For example, one mother said she really liked showcasing her one-year-old son on Facebook because, “he represents me right now, you know?
He represents what makes me the happiest, what my daily life is all about.” On the other hand, another mother who had a six-month-old son said of her posting, “I feel like I’m kind of stewarding my son’s privacy since he doesn’t have a chance yet to say, ‘hey, mom, could you not post that on Facebook?'”
So to answer the question that came to my mind when I started seeing all those pregnancy announcements, yes, parents are thinking about their children’s privacy. With these two studies, our team conducted some of the earliest research on how parents manage their children’s digital identities. Right around the time our team wrapped up this work in 2015, media and academic attention to the topic ballooned.
The Sharenting Debate
News organizations like The Guardian and NPR published headlines asking, “Does sharing photos of your children on Facebook put them at risk?” and “Do parents invade children’s privacy when they post photos online?” Researchers across a variety of disciplines started publishing papers answering these very questions. The practice also attracted a name, “sharenting,” a portmanteau of the words “share” and “parenting.”
People were paying attention to, as The New York Times put it, “the problem of sharenting.” Now, it was certainly exciting to see my research topic attract so much attention. But when I read these articles, I noticed something interesting and a bit frustrating.
Many of these articles portrayed so-called sharenting as something negative that parents needed to be warned about. This contrasted our team’s early studies. The parents we talked to did not just recognize these tensions, they experienced them, they were living them, and they were trying to address them in the best ways they could.
Examining Expert Opinions
I observed a disconnect between the way our research participants talked about managing their children’s digital identities and the way these news articles and research papers talked about it. This observation informed my second project in the area of families, technology use, and privacy, which examined how different kinds of experts judge parents for the way they post about children online. By this point, I was at the University of Maryland, where I collected nearly 500 English language social media posts, news articles, and research papers on the topic of sharenting and parental oversharing.
These materials were published between 2006 and 2020, and I analyzed them using a method of discourse analysis, which examines how power works through language to shape the world. I studied how these materials characterized parents’ online posting, what advice and recommendations they gave about it, and what rationale they offered for giving such guidance. The common thread I observed running through these materials is that they portrayed parents’ social media use as a problem, saying that parents who post about their children online might be overreaching by sharing information that belongs to their children, or that parents might be putting their children at risk by circulating data about them online.
Problematic Framing of Parental Social Media Use
They suggested that parents need to be more responsible in the way they use social media, for instance, by adjusting their privacy settings, reducing their number of social media connections, not posting certain kinds of content, or not posting about their kids at all. Now, these are all common-sense reactions to concerns about digital information flows. But this broader framing of parents’ social media use as inherently problematic is, well, problematic.
It ignores the fact that throughout time people have always used technologies, from pencil and paper to cameras and computers, to record and share information about their lives. In fact, as media scholar Lee Humphreys has explained, we need this kind of documentation to make sense of ourselves and our lives as our identities shift and evolve. Looking over old documents, recordings, and photos can help people shape their sense of self, construct a coherent life story, and feel connected to others.
The Need for a New Approach
And now, much of this documentation and sharing happens through social media. It’s not fair to make parents feel like they must hide this part of their identity from the web. That said, it’s true that a parent’s story is fundamentally intertwined with their child’s.
So, perhaps we need to rethink posting online as something fundamentally collaborative rather than individual. Instead of relying on expert advice about how to approach social media, parents can treat posting as something to navigate together with their child. This means talking with a child about what they feel is and is not okay for a parent to post about them, and having these conversations regularly, knowing that a child’s preferences will change as they grow up.
Just as we need to rethink how we approach posting, we also need to rethink how we approach privacy. Critiques of sharenting rely largely on the idea of privacy as having control over your information. This approach, while well-meaning, doesn’t align with the way the digital environment works.
An analog photo sits in one place and is only visible when someone displays it. A photo posted on social media sits on a corporate server and is available to others in ways we might not know or expect. For example, parents can’t control when other people post content about their children online.
Parents can’t control when other people take screenshots of content about their children. Parents can’t control how a social media algorithm circulates content about their children, or how a search engine indexes content about their children, or how a developer uses content about their children to train facial recognition systems or AI chatbots. Indeed, none of us, individually, can control these uses of our information.
The Need for Comprehensive Privacy Laws
It doesn’t have to be this way. To give an analog example, media scholar Lee Humphreys explains that the film company Kodak processed millions of photos for people, but it did not hold on to user information with the goal of profiting off of that data. Instead, it made its money selling film and development services.
Social media platforms, of course, follow a different business model. They frame what they do as passively collecting information that users consciously and voluntarily offer. In reality, these companies have actively designed their systems to extract as much of our data as possible, and they have crafted terms of service and privacy policies that give them wide latitude to use this data in almost any way they want.
This is putting all of us, including children, at risk. Comprehensive privacy laws that prohibit behavioral advertising and limit data collection would be a first step towards creating a digital ecosystem that doesn’t force people to choose between social connection and data protection. I’m at a stage in life now when most of my friends have kids.
Conclusion: The Ongoing Privacy Challenge
And since I don’t see these friends as often, social media is my window into sharing their joy at watching their kids grow up. At the same time, I’ve been studying digital privacy for more than a decade now. And with the rise of technologies like facial recognition and generative AI, sometimes it feels like the privacy issues are only getting worse.
But then I remind myself, privacy is not a static value. It’s a dynamic practice, something we’re constantly navigating as technology and society evolve. When it comes to protecting our children’s privacy, many parents are doing the best they can, but they can’t do it alone.
In our fight for privacy, we need to focus less on the actions of individual parents and more on the political and economic forces that drive social media platforms to extract our data for profit. Parenting is hard enough. We shouldn’t make it harder by holding parents responsible for the problems of social media platforms. Thank you.