In this podcast we discuss the unintended consequences of sharenting, how parents’ desire to share with pride or to share to shame contravenes the rights of the child to privacy and how otherwise innocent postings of children can lead to abuse. Also the difference between “data” in Europe and “speech” in the US impacts childrens’ “Right to be Forgotten”, and the relevance of an 80 year old legal case to the 21st Century social media problem.
As usual there’s a lightly edited for legibility transcript of the interview below, for those that can’t use podcasts or for those that simply prefer to read:
Neil Fairbrother
Welcome to another edition of the SafeToNet Foundation’s safeguarding podcast where we talk about all things to do with safeguarding children in the online digital context.
The online digital context comprises three areas, technology, law and ethics in culture. We have child safeguarding right in the centre of this Venn diagram and encompasses all stakeholders between a child using a smartphone and the content or person online that they are interacting with.
In this podcast we’re talking about Sharenting and children’s privacy in the age of social media and today’s guest, Legal Skills Professor of the University of Florida at the Levin College of Law, Stacy Steinberg is on the line from the Sunshine State and will guide us through this complex topic.
Welcome to the podcast. Stacy,
Stacey Steinberg
Thank you so much for having me here. It’s a pleasure to speak with you.
Neil Fairbrother
Thank you. Can you give us a brief resume please, of your background and the work you’re involved in, so our listeners around the world have a context for your point of view, where you’re coming from.
Stacey Steinberg
Absolutely. So I graduated law school in 2003 and I set off as a prosecutor at the state attorney’s office where I specialized in crimes against children and sexually violent crimes. I did that for about a decade. During that time, I began to teach as an adjunct professor at the university of Florida in the area of juvenile law and I joined the faculty full time in 2012 I was very interested in juvenile law from the start, so that was something that I was really excited to get to do when I was at the university.
I’m a mom and I have three children and when my second son was born, I became very interested in photography and so alongside my teaching I was also taking a lot of pictures, not just with my own kids, I was also offering free pictures to families who had children that were suffering from significant medical issues like paediatric cancer. So I was taking a lot of pictures and with the family’s blessings we were sharing the pictures on social media to raise awareness and to build community.
And around 2015 I started to question whether my desire to share photos of both my own children and thows of other people’s children’s with their blessings might be in contrast to the children’s rights that I felt so strongly about, specifically about a child’s right to privacy. So in 2015/2016 I wrote my first paper “Sharenting and Children’s Privacy in the age of Social Media”. I set off thinking that there would be a legal solution to sharenting, and what I came away with was the realization that this is much more of a public health model.
Neil Fairbrother
Now in your paper you say that children do have an interest in privacy. What age does that manifest itself, that interest in privacy?
Stacey Steinberg
Kids have an interest in privacy that is evolving with the ages and stages of children. I don’t think it’s like a switch that turns on or off, but I think that children of all ages have an interest of, one day in the future, having control of the information that is out there about them. You know, obviously you can’t ask a two year old if they’re okay with certain information being posted online versus a 12 year old or a 13 year old, but even a two year old does have an interest in what information is being let into the public sphere because as that child gets older, that information will be part of the child’s digital record.
Neil Fairbrother
Yes, indeed. And you’ve kind of touched on the central dilemma of your paper there, which is that parents are generally regarded as the natural carers for and protectors of their children , but sharing their children’s details online without their child’s consent or understanding of potential risks is in itself a source of potential harm to the child and could contravene any rights to the child’s privacy. And as you succinctly put it in your report, there is no opt-out link for children. Does this mean that has to be a fundamental rethink on how parents approach parenting online?
Stacey Steinberg
Yes. I think there has to be a fundamental rethink, and I’d even go so far as to say there needs to be a fundamental think. Because in my experience the issue is not that parents are trying to be malicious or trying to overshare when they post about their kids online, I think most of them just haven’t taken the chance to even think about the long term implications of a child’s digital footprint.
And so it’s something that we all should take a pause on and recognize that just like other areas of childhood development and education that we need to do as parents, whether it’s feeding or discipline or what schools to send our children to, this is just another realm and it’s a new realm. So it’s not even on parents’ radars yet, at least here in the States.
Neil Fairbrother
Well, yes, I think it’s a pretty universal thing really based on the conversations I’ve had so far. So we talk about children, your report talks about children, and one of the things you say is that children have no control over the dissemination of their personal information by their parents, which is different from when adults and teenagers share. So when you are talking about children, do you really mean preteens? Are you differentiating between preteens and teenagers or does this apply to all under eighteens, which is what most people regard as a child, someone under 18?
Stacey Steinberg
I think that I refer to it as all children just in different contexts and experiences. But I think that the issues apply universally to children generally.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. Now you’re focusing a lot on data privacy, but also on the types of photos and images that parents share of their children. And in your paper you cite some research done by the University of Michigan that categorises the different types of photos parents share. What are those categories that the University of Michigan has come up with and do any one of those categories have more of an unintended impact on the children than any other?
Stacey Steinberg
Well, I don’t have the study pulled up in front of me and I’d be happy to go ahead and pull it up now. But the categories that I think of when I think of that study offhand, is that it has information that can be personally identifiable back to the children. And there are certain categories that are of more concern to me, and I would think that the categories that have the most concern to me probably have to do with wellbeing issues and how the child might feel if they come face-to-face with those disclosures as they become adults.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. The personally identifiable information that you mentioned there, you say that can pose a risk to children. How does that work? How, how does that happen?
Stacey Steinberg
When we put information out there into the public sphere, that might include child’s date of birth or names where they’re living, all of this information can go on to build the child’s digital dossier and it can create a way for governments, marketers, and others to be able to find out about the child in very specific ways.
But what we do know is that the more information that can lead a third party to know specific information about the child, the more that the other information that parents share about them can lead back to them. And I just did pull up the Michigan study, and I think that the five ways specifically were: 1) getting children to sleep, 2) nutrition and eating tips, 3) discipline, 4) day care preschool and 5) behavioural issues. And of those five, I think that the behavioural issues are probably what concerns me the most. Also discipline.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. And why would that be?
Stacey Steinberg
Well, those are the types of things that you or I, for example, wouldn’t want to be out in the public sphere. If I do something that I later regret or if I have some sort of a behavioural problem, I certainly wouldn’t want my friends posting about that information online. I think sometimes parents think of their children more as objects than individuals and so they post information without thinking how that child might feel if they come face-to-face with that information.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. So you mentioned just a moment ago dossiers, digital dossiers on children. Now the EU Kids Online project run by Sonia Livingstone created a framework of online risks, one of which is commercial risks. And in your report you say that “children’s merchandise market is in the hundreds of billions of dollars in the US alone and therefore it’s not surprising that data brokers are already seeking to compile dossiers on children. What are data brokers?
Stacey Steinberg
These are individuals or companies who are taking advantage of all of the different data points that are being released into the public sphere about individuals and not even necessarily into the public sphere but in but released into private into apps that people are using into websites people are visiting. And each of these data points can be collected to build a profile on the individual users.
Just this week we really seen an explosion for example, of the health data points that are being collected by websites like Google on individuals. And while there might be some benefits to this sort of data collection, there is a lot that we don’t know. And the biggest concern that I have, is that while adults might be able to give some forms of consent, I think it’s rare that they’re giving full informed consent and moreover it would be very difficult for them to give informed consent on behalf of their kids because kids really don’t have a say yet.
Neil Fairbrother
Well, it will indeed. Now this does seem to somewhat make a bit of a mockery of the US COPPA Child Online Privacy Protection Act legislation, because the theory behind that is that informed consent is given by the parent for the child under the age of 13. But if parents are wittingly or unwittingly providing this information themselves about their children, then those data brokers can claim that they didn’t get the information about children from children but from the parents. So isn’t that a sidestep of the good intention of the COPPA legislation?
Stacey Steinberg
Sure, absolutely. There there’s been some really fantastic work being done by Professors Fox and Hoy, I believe, that their research focuses on placing some of the responsibility on the marketers themselves because by collecting this information from a vulnerable population, they are really sidestepping a lot of the aims of what we in the States have is like the COPPA legislation that prohibits collecting personal information.
And so placing the responsibility on data collectors to understand that when it comes to kids, that the parents who are sharing are often a vulnerable population in and of themselves as new parents and that while society seems to demonize the parents for sharing, it really should be the marketers and the companies that shoulder that responsibility.
Neil Fairbrother
Yeah. Okay. You make the rather startling point that in the US 92% of two year olds already have an online presence. What do you see as the consequences of that being?
Stacey Steinberg
I think that it shows just the regularity in which parents choose to share about their children, how common it is, how it’s almost an expectation that parents are going to share. Professor Luptin for example talks about how parents sometimes share not just for their own benefit but because they feel a societal pressure to do that.
And so when we think about that startling statistic, to me it puts a point on the reality that this is a cultural norm here and therefore approaching kind of a sense of warning or educating parents really has to recognize that if we don’t do it carefully, then what we end up doing is we shame parents and that’s certainly not what I want to do.
Neil Fairbrother
Well indeed. Now you mentioned sharing, we’ve been talking about sharing, but there is an expression in use at the moment which is a “parental oversharing”. What is parental oversharing?
Stacey Steinberg
So I think parental oversharing is when it goes a step further than just posting information online, but posting information that really does have the potential to embarrass or to harm the child. There are lots of different places where folks would draw the line as to what parental oversharing might be. To me it’s one of those “I know it when I see it” sorts of things.
When I see parents sharing information that makes me, you know, put my hand over my eyes and shake my head, I know we’ve crossed that line. But any information that can damage a child, whether damage them in more tangible ways like identity theft or digital kidnapping or God forbid actual harm in the physical world, or whether it’s information that can significantly embarrass a child, or cause the child to distance themselves, or find fault with their parents for making those disclosures as they get older.
Neil Fairbrother
Yeah. Okay. Then you mentioned digital kidnapping there. Now what is digital kidnapping?
Stacey Steinberg
So digital kidnapping is when individuals take pictures that other parents have shared and either post those pictures as if they are their own children, or collect and collate those pictures to use for a third purpose. So for example, my paper talks about a mother who’s child’s picture was taken and another individual on Facebook used that picture as their profile picture and claimed that that child was this other person’s child.
More recently there was a case of a parent of a young boy who was a wrestler. That parent had shared the picture on an Instagram feed and the picture was then taken by this third party who then shared it on an Instagram page that seemed to collect pictures of young boys and the followers of that page were looking at those pictures for nefarious purposes.
The most startling statistic that gets to this is what Australia’s e-Safety Commissioner had found a number of years ago, which said that 50% of all images that were on paedophile image sharing sites, these aren’t paedophilia images, but images that appealed to paedophiles which had originated on parent blogs and on parents’ social media.
Neil Fairbrother
Yeah. We’re going to visit that a little bit later in the in the discussion I think. Now one of the practices that you describe is “sharenting to discipline”. How does sharenting to discipline work?
Stacey Steinberg
Well, some parents think that it’s a good idea to publicly shame their kids in order to teach them a lesson. So for example, we see in cases of children who had been caught stealing and the parent would have them stand on the side of the road with a sign that said, “I’m a thief”, you know, or “Look at me, I’m a thief and I’m wrong for doing it”. Or a parent who might post a picture of a child’s referral slip that they got sent home from school for bad behaviour and post that online and almost try to make a mockery of the child. To me, that really crosses a line that’s even way further than oversharing and I would argue that it’s bad parenting. But then again that might be a subjective feeling.
Neil Fairbrother
Point taken. It may will be a subjective view, but it does bring to mind things like the old fashioned stocks where people were shamed in public. It’s a form of stigmatization. It’s a form of abuse in itself, is it not?
Stacey Steinberg
I believe so. I’ve recently been working on a book that’ll come out next year and I have a piece in it that talks about shame and kind of the different types of shame that social media presents when it comes to children’s lives. Some of it is, you know, the shame of a parent picks up their child’s phone and see some pictures that the parent doesn’t like and disciplines the child for those and kind of how interesting that is because when I was a teen, there were things that I did that if my parents knew about, I’d be very embarrassed and maybe they should have known, maybe they shouldn’t.
But the reality is, is that my behavior changed because of my natural consequences. For example, in my peer and social circles, if I said something that I shouldn’t have said, but now that parents pick up their kids phones on the counter and read these conversations, parents really shame their kids and add kind of a new dimension to that child learning right from wrong. And the other piece of shame is this piece that comes when parents might overshare information about their kids for disciplinary purposes, which I sound like you and I have similar viewpoints on the appropriateness of.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay now today is Friday the 15th of November and it’s the last day of Anti-Bullying Week in the UK, which is organized by the Anti-Bullying Alliance and it’s one of the, if you want to call it a highlight of the anti-bullying calendar, then that’s what it is. It’s a shame that we have to have such a thing, but it is a very well regarded week that promotes anti-bullying practices and anti-cyberbullying practices. And one of the outcomes of sharenting you say in your paper is cyberbullying. So you have a situation where parents, proud parents are for the best of intentions, publishing information about their children online, some photos, maybe it’s for a bit of a laugh. How does that lead to cyberbullying?
Stacey Steinberg
So I think you’re talking about cyberbullying of the parents themselves and what we’ve seen is, you know, there are certainly parents out there online, individuals out there online, who take pride in making fun of other people’s missteps or what they perceive to be other people’s missteps. And so what you have, and there was a website, I don’t know if it still exists, where the primary goal of the website was to make fun of what parents shared about their kids.
Maybe the parents shouldn’t have shared the information in the first place, but that’s neither here nor there. It’s certainly for another individual to take that post that the parent made and to make fun of that parent, to call that parent out to see public attention or the jokes that they’re making about the parent and through the parent, the child I think would really be a form of cyberbullying.
Sue Scheff, who I look to when I think about shame, the idea of shame and cyberbullying and how much damage that can do to a person’s reputation, she wrote a book called “Shame Nation”, which is really enlightening. Unfortunately it’s a new reality in our digital age and something that we all need to think deeply about and figuring out how to create laws that can protect individuals from things like cyberbullying, but also how we can educate individuals that the person that you are making fun of online is the same person that if they were sitting beside you, you wouldn’t dare do the same to.
Neil Fairbrother
Yeah, and the law is a very interesting concept in this case. There would appear to be a very strong moral case for not sharing even the most innocent images of children online, but what about the legal case? Now obviously you’re discussing things from a US legislative perspective, but there may be lessons from that that will be applicable to other countries as well. Now, one of the legal cases that you described in your paper stood out for me as, even though it was some 70 or 80 years ago, it still resonates with what’s going on today, and that is a case called Sidis versus FR Publishing. Can you tell us about that?
Stacey Steinberg
So this case was one of my favourite cases to study when I was looking at this topic because I saw so many similarities to what we do here today. So Sidis was a young boy and he was a brilliant young man who his parents seemed to have kind of put on display and the media was really interested in him. He was what they would call a young prodigy. And he was somebody who the public was really interested in seeing what is going to happen with this brilliant young man. And so kind of even the way that we see child stars today on TV or on the internet, I guess was in papers and newspapers and things like that when he was a child. Sidis grew up though, and he decided he didn’t like being in the public spotlight, he wanted to lead a very private life.
And here in the States, folks who are public figures, there are different ways that the media is allowed to reach out to them to try to get stories about them and sort of publish information about them, and he didn’t want to be considered a public figure, he wanted to be considered a private figure. The court, I believe, used the phrase that “he wanted to lead a reclusive life”.
Despite all the lengths that he went through to try to lead a private life, the New Yorker was able to gather information about him and ran a story about his life and provided the readers with a lot of intimate details about the secluded existence of Sidis. Sidis sued the New Yorker and he argued that he had a right to privacy under State law. In the United States there are different States with different rights to privacy.
So in New York it’s one of the States that does have a right to privacy, but the court disagreed with Sidis’ argument and found that because he was a public figure as a child, he would always be considered a public figure. The court said that the public was naturally interested in the story that was reported by the New Yorker and despite Sidis’ wishes to retreat from the public sphere and to be hidden from the public media attention, the court held that remaining outside of the public eye was not actually an option for Sidis or for any individual who was once held the public spotlight. And so in making this holding the court did recognize that individuals like Sidis had an interest in privacy, but that the public also had an interest in knowing about his life of course.
Neil Fairbrother
Well. Exactly. And the parallel is obvious because if a parent makes a child by accident or design into an internet star, then that child even as an adult has no recourse to privacy even though that may be what he or she actually wants.
Stacey Steinberg
Right, and we don’t know how this will play out today. It might play out very differently, but it seems from this case that there’s a pretty good argument that they no longer had the same rights of privacy as an adult.
Here in the States, we’ve had a few shows on TV that kind of made fun of kids. There was a show called “Honey Boo Boo” that was out for a while about a little girl and it really didn’t put the little girl in the most positive light and you wonder when 20 years from now when she’s an adult, how she’ll feel if the decision like this is applied to her life. And that’s just TV. Think of all of the kids who are made into internet stars through YouTube and social media.
Neil Fairbrother
Yeah. Now you mentioned that States within the United States have some latitude when it comes to creating state-wide law as opposed to following national Federal law. And you point out that California is often regarded as a leader in digital privacy protection. How is it setting about doing that and will other States follow their lead do you think?
Stacey Steinberg
I think that there’s hope that other States or even our Federal government will follow the lead. There is pending legislation that would broaden the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) to give kids some of the protections that California gives. To give you a little bit of background, I know you know, but to give the readers a little bit of background on why California is considered to be kind of this leader, is because while it doesn’t have a right to be forgotten in the way that you all do [as a member of the EU], it does require that websites that have kids posting on it, that those kids have a right to delete the information that they themselves share.
So, for example, your average 13 year old kiddo who posts something online and then a year later wishes that they didn’t, under California law my understanding is that the child would have a right to take that information down. I wrote in my paper, and I am quoting somebody here, that California recognizes that kids “self-reveal before they self-reflect” if that makes sense.
And so it looks like I was stating from an article in the New York Times called “Sharing, with a Safety Net” by Somini Sengupta. And I found that that phrase “self-reveal before they self-reflect” to be really enlightening and really helpful to understand California’s law and why other States and perhaps our Federal government might want to follow suit.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. Now in your report, you refer to the UNCRC, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. And as you also point out, the US is only one of two countries around the world that hasn’t ratified this. Why is it that the US hasn’t ratified the UNCRC and would it help create a legal framework that would help protect children’s rights on line if they did?
Stacey Steinberg
That question is too hard for me to answer for you today. The reason why, I don’t know, I will be looking for that podcast where you get that answer.
Neil Fairbrother
It’s cropped up before and I’m still searching for an answer, so…
Stacey Steinberg
But would it help? I think it would. I mean we don’t have a codified right to privacy here in the United States for children. In the cases that I have seen that talk about the right to privacy for kids, they really place the right to privacy as to the whole family. So the whole family might have a right to privacy as a family unit, but there aren’t cases that give kids a right to privacy separate and apart from their parents except for a very limited number of cases that talk about perhaps like abortion rights where kids might have a right to privacy if they were able to kind of get a court override to not tell their parents, for example. I wouldn’t call myself an expert in that specific line of cases, but what I can say is that it’s a very narrow category of situations where a court is going to recognize that a child has a right to privacy separate and apart from that.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. Now we mentioned two things here. We mentioned that individual States within the US are able to create their own state-wide laws and we also mentioned the UNCRC. Would it be possible for an individual State within the US to ratify and adopt the UNCRC in state-wide legislation irrespective of what goes on at the Federal level?
Stacey Steinberg
I mean, I guess they could create laws that model the language of the UNCRC. Certainly those different laws could be challenged through the court system and I think one of the reasons why privacy laws in the context of sharing might get challenged is because we have really strong free speech protections in the United States. Any law that was going to limit what a parent could or couldn’t say about a child online or even any sort of law that would allow a child to delete information that a third party said about them online would have strong free speech implications. And I’m not that they would withstand constitutional muster.
Neil Fairbrother
Yeah, well, and that is a very interesting difference between the US and Europe, the two regions do have divergent views on privacy. For example, as you rightly say, in the EU under the Data Privacy Directive, we have the Right to be Forgotten as you’ve mentioned. And this works because over here Brexit not withstanding, we regard this information as “data”, but in the US it’s regarded as “speech” and falls under the First Amendment principles, which presumably is what you just mentioned, the freedom of speech.
Stacey Steinberg
Yes. I’m really fascinated by this and you know, and I’ve had some really interesting conversations lately. I just got back from the Swiss Institute of Comparative Law where I spent some time talking to folks who are studying children’s rights online and privacy issues for kids from all over the country and this data versus speech discussion came up.
I think in my paper I make perhaps an overly bold argument that says that when a child is young and a parent is sharing information about a child online, that parent is exercising his or her right to free speech. And so therefore that speech right is significant and the potential privacy issues that are facing that, you know, two, three, four year old child are pretty small. But as a child gets older, the speech that the parent made when the child was young, that the expressive value of that speech diminishes and has to make way for the competing privacy issues of the child.
And so as the child gets older, that information that might have rightfully been called speech 10 years earlier now is really just data, just information stored online, in the cloud or wherever this information is stored ,that contributes to the child’s digital footprint. There is no more expressive interest that the parent holds or if there is, it’s very minimal comparative to the interest in the child to protect his or her own data.
I don’t know if that makes sense to you, but it’s a little bit of a bold argument and I’m not sure a lot of people agree with me, but I really like it.
Neil Fairbrother
Well, it does make sense to a layman such as myself. Now in your report, you say that “…children who grow up with a sense of privacy, coupled with supportive parents, report greater life satisfaction than children who grow up with controlling parents…” and you imply that there’s less of a legal model perhaps, but more of a public health model of child protection. If that is the case, what would it be? What would that public health model of child protection?
Stacey Steinberg
So to me that the public health model isn’t about limiting parents from speaking or from posting, but instead of that, educating parents as to the potential risks of sharing too much online and placing parents in the driver’s seat, that once they had the information, once they are well informed, that they are best suited to make these decisions on behalf of their family, not the government.
I have an example that I can share that might kind of illustrate this in practice. So years ago babies were put to sleep on their tummies, and in those babies, we saw an increased risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). And so children who are placed to sleep on their stomachs, paediatricians were realizing we’re at greater risk of harm and governments did not make laws that stopped parents from putting babies to sleep on their tummies, but instead they created a public health campaign. In the States it was called the “Back to Sleep” campaign.
I’m not sure if that was where you are as well, but it was geared towards educating parents that there are risks of putting babies to sleep on their tummies. And what it did is it encouraged parents to put their babies to sleep on their backs, because their kids would have better outcomes. Once parents were aware of the risk, they were starting to follow suit and put their babies to sleep on their backs.
Sure it was a little harder. Babies like to sleep on their tummies, so getting a baby to sleep on their back took a little bit more time. But parents want to do what’s best for their kids and once they have the information, they can better guide themselves into making better decisions. Now, of course the risk of SIDS is much more significant than the risk of oversharing online, I’m not trying to draw that sort of comparison, but what I’m trying to say is simply that parents are willing to do things the harder way if it means that their kids will be better off.
Neil Fairbrother
Yes, I understand that. Obviously a child dying is the worst possible outcome. Nonetheless, there are significant risks for posting even the most innocent images and although the EU has this Right to be Forgotten that we’ve just spoken about and there is a sort of equivalent in California, at least to my mind, that’s already too late. The bad actors that are out there, the paedophiles for example, are taking images, still images or video of just innocent images and innocent videos and are misappropriating them.
Earlier this year, Wired magazine ran a story concerning paedophiles’ use of YouTube, for example. So they would place comments in the comment section underneath the video with the timestamp of a particular frame which would show, for example, a little girls playing Twister or doing gymnastics, playing in the pool, eating ice lollies and they were sexualizing these totally innocent images, which I think most people, most parents are still not aware that that happens on photo sites or on YouTube.
And of course you then have the commercial aspect of this because YouTube algorithms will serve up an advert and the more comments are put next to a video, the more popular it becomes, the more adverts are shown and so on, so the more money people make out of that. The advertisers started to pull back their advertising from the YouTube business model because of this posting of timestamps against perfectly innocent images. Wouldn’t be best if parents simply didn’t have the right to share any images of their children online at all?
Stacey Steinberg
I don’t think that I would go as far as to say that parents should be stopped from sharing all together for a few reasons. The parental autonomy piece is big, but I also think that society benefits by parents sharing online, that there is power in our stories and there’s power in narratives. And while there are risks associated with being bold and brave and vulnerable online, there’s also a lot of good that comes out of us connecting to one another online.
And so I don’t think it’s as simple as simply stopping parents from doing it all together, although I do recognize the risks you’re talking about. And you know, I think that it goes even further. There was a paper that I wrote about something called morphed child pornography, which is when paedophiles take innocent images of a child and they alter the picture to make it appear that the child is doing something sexual. So the risk is real. Absolutely. I just am of the mindset that stopping parents from sharing altogether is not the way forward.
Neil Fairbrother
And it would be very difficult to enforce that anyway. Now towards the end of your report you make seven recommendations. We are running short of time. I wonder if we can very quickly go over the seven recommendations that you make? So the first one is “Parents should familiarize themselves with the privacy policies of the sites with which they share”.
Stacey Steinberg
So this is something that is ideally we are all going to read the nitty gritty of our privacy policies before we engage online. There are caveats to the effectiveness of this though. First of all, we know that there are lots of data breaches and privacy breaches that take place even on the site after we read the privacy policies. Second, those privacy policies are written in languages that are really hard to understand.
So I think that part of this first step, kind of in my evolution of working through this issue is that if there should be laws, the laws should be placed on companies, the burden on companies, to make these privacy policies available to consumers in a way that is easily understood and perhaps more easily enforceable that there might be liability on the company if they don’t obey their policy.
Neil Fairbrother
The second recommendation you make is that “Parents should set up notifications to alert them when their child’s name appears in a Google search result”.
Stacey Steinberg
Yes. One thing that I have found to be very helpful in my work is that I’m able to set up alerts through Google and through a site called Talkwalker, there’s other sites like Mention, and anytime my name appears online I’ll get an email the next morning giving me a heads up that “Hey, there was an article that quoted you” or that you were mentioned on a website. Parents who do choose to share publicly and use their children’s names might be interested in using a service like that so they can control or at least be aware of the flow of information as it becomes available in the public sphere.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. Third one is “Parents should consider sometimes sharing anonymously”.
Stacey Steinberg
Yes, as I mentioned earlier, there are benefits to sharing our stories and that there is power in our narratives. That said, when we share embarrassing information or some of the information that, for example, the University of Michigan study warned us about parents sharing, it’s helpful to think about the benefit of not using a child’s name so that if you do need help with discipline or you do need help with a mental illness that your child is struggling through, that perhaps finding a way to share your story anonymously might be a better path forward in getting the relief that you seek.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. Number four is that “Parents should use caution before sharing their child’s actual location”.
Stacey Steinberg
This goes, I think to the tangible harms, the, you know, the folks in the real world who might wish to do their children harm. It could also go perhaps to that data collection. If there are ways for websites to collect information from photos, like for example at the house number is behind the picture that you post of your child in their Halloween costume. You’ve just given a lot of people information about where it is that you live or if you take a picture of your child in front of the school where the child goes to school. So I think that it’s helpful to think about taking that information off the actual picture, but also to consider disabling the GPS feature before sharing information online about kids.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. Now number five is that “Parents should give their children veto power over online disclosures including images, quotes, accomplishments and challenges”. And this is particularly interesting because you say in the notes about that that by the age of four children have a sense of self.
Stacey Steinberg
This is probably the biggest one that I find helpful as a parent. Kids are gonna going to be exposed to social media and the online world by the age of 10 or 11 just as a result of being in the digital society we all find ourselves in. It’s helpful to start very young and talking to kids about about your sense of self and about how the role of social media and other online sources in portraying who we are or what our images.
I’m not saying we should teach our kids to care about what their image is online when they’re four or five years old, but we should recognize that kids even that young have an interest in being seen in the most positive light and so having them join in those conversations early is helpful. That conversation, we’ll get more specific as the kids get older, but by the time kids are eight or nine, it’s really helpful for them to have full veto power over the pictures that we share with them because in just a few years they are going to be the ones with the camera deciding whether or not to share a picture of a third party and it’s important that they understand that that person that they’re photographing has a right to give consent or to deny consent before our children are posting pictures of others.
Neil Fairbrother
Indeed the penultimate one that the says “Parents should consider not sharing pictures that show their children in any state of undress” and obviously this is perfectly innocent states of undress such as being on the beach and so on. I guess.
Stacey Steinberg
Yes, and I’m so excited for you to get more information from Australia’s e-Safety Commissioner because a lot of the work that I’ve done in this area stemmed from their findings, but it’s very important that parents understand that there are people who might want to take those pictures and use them in a way that you could never imagine or you don’t want to imagine.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. The seventh and final recommendation you make is that “Parents should consider the effect that sharing can have on their child’s current and future sense of self and wellbeing”.
Stacey Steinberg
Absolutely. Parents have to think about how their child would feel if they picked up their phone and saw the picture that they shared, you know, hours after the photo was shared. But they also need to think about how their child would feel if one day they log in and see all of the pictures that were shared during childhood. How will the child feel about this digital trail?
So by parents considering how the child feel now and years from now, they could go very far and helping protect that parent-child relationship and the child’s overall wellbeing. You think of the child who recently was potty trained, who right now might be really proud of the M&M’s that they might get for getting off the potty and having done what they were supposed to do, but that same picture that might’ve been really cute to the three year old is going to be absolutely mortifying to the 13 year old.
Neil Fairbrother
Isn’t that just so? Listen Stacy, we’re well over time so we’re going to have to wrap it up here. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much for your contribution to the podcast. It’s been a fascinating insight into certainly the US legal perspective on a child’s privacy online.
Stacey Steinberg
Thank you so much for having me today.