No matter how careful parents have been, there will always be a worrying abundance of details about their children online. Photo / 123rf
“You’re Elise, aren’t you?” said the lady, crouching down before my 5-year-old daughter in the middle of Kensington High St. “I remember when you were born – all that way away in LA!”
Every parent has experienced that moment: the moment you switch from relaxed to hyper-focused. You’re smiling at this person interacting with your child in the street or the playground – this stranger who is, maybe, a little too close, a little too interested – but every ninja sense is on high alert. You’re assessing their clothes and demeanour; you’re trying to work out whether they’re over-friendly or a psychopath. One false move is all it would take for you to turn feral.
After a few more questions – was Elise American, then, or British? Where was her daddy now? Because she was his “number one fan”, watched Piers every morning on Good Morning Britain – the woman must have sensed my unease. Patting my daughter’s head, she wandered off. No harm, no foul. But the encounter left me on edge.
I don’t post pictures of my child on social media – and never will. Those forms schools and clubs get you to fill out, asking whether you “consent to images being shared” on their website? I always tick “no”. Like every columnist, I will occasionally use something she has said or done to illustrate a wider point in print, but I would never offer up any of her personal feelings or private challenges for public consumption.
I thought I’d done everything I could to shield her from prying eyes, but when I started researching my new book, The Square, I realised that no matter how careful you’ve been – and whether your parents happen to be in the public eye or not – there will always be an alarming quantity of details about you online. Enough crumbs of information about your life for anyone to piece together, should they choose to.
According to the Information Commissioner’s Office, when it comes to identity theft, just your name, address and birth date is enough to create another “you”. So if someone is collecting information about you from the internet, you’d better hope they have a positive agenda.
It’s disconcerting enough for an adult to be confronted by the extent of their digital footprints, even if that’s often our fault, a result of us oversharing or being shockingly lax with our “online hygiene”. And although my IT consultant heroine, Colette – who looks after all the residents of a leafy west London Square – is appalled by how careless her clients are with their own privacy, when one of those clients is murdered, she soon finds herself using those digital footprints to track down the culprit.
But what about the children who have deliberately been exposed by so-called “sharenters’” The generation whose pictures and videos have been pumped out from pre-birth – when they were just flageolet-sized blurs on a sonogram – and whose personal development has been documented right through to puberty? As a social experiment, we don’t yet know the cost to their lives.
According to a 2020 study, the average British parent has posted 1500 photos of their child before they reached the age of 5. Today, over 40 per cent of UK parents will put photos or videos of their children online – far more than in many countries across Europe – despite predictions by financial institutions like Barclays that this surplus of readily available information will put them at greater risk of identity theft as they get older. Indeed, one 2018 study estimated “sharenting” could result in up to 7.4 million instances of online identity fraud by 2030 and potentially cost these kids £676 million ($1.41 billion).
You run the risk of exposing them to other predators of every description and online grooming, of course, and then there’s psychological damage specialists are forever warning parents about: the depression, eating disorders, sleep disturbances and addiction children may suffer from after being continuously offered up to public viewing – and, therefore, criticism.
According to the UK-based therapist, Gillian Bridge, author of Sweet Distress: How Our Love Affair with Feelings Has Fuelled the Current Mental Health Crisis, the real problem is that “it objectifies children, putting your preferred version of who they are ahead of their developing self-image. It sets them in amber, pinned to a board, just like a Victorian collector’s butterfly.”
Consequently, she says, “they may feel constrained by this; either to be what you want them to be, or to rebel against the created image. Their freedom to develop in other ways may be impacted negatively, and other possible outcomes include resentment, hazy sense of identity, fear of exposure, loss of trust and a need for audiences at all costs, playing to the said audiences at all times – a loss of authenticity.”
High-profile figures and influencers may have cynical reasons for sharenting and be able to monetise those happy memories with brand partnerships, among other things, but isn’t it also natural to be proud of your offspring, and want to share their achievements with others? Being married to a public figure may have made me excessively wary. Certainly, in my friendship group, I am the only one who doesn’t occasionally post birthdays, first school days and amusing family holiday snaps.
As one friend, Jessica, maintains: “There is nothing wrong with posting occasional milestones, but you have to be acutely aware of how even the most banal snap or caption may impact them – particularly as they get older.” Another mother of three, Maria, has learnt “always to check with them first, particularly in their fragile teenage years, when particularly girls can be so self-conscious about their looks”.
I’m endlessly thankful that I grew up without iPhones, in the age of carrier pigeons, but I can still remember how I felt as a tween when my mother would pull back the curtain of a changing room in a busy shop too soon – “does it fit?” Multiply that flash of shame and vulnerability by a thousand, and that must be how some secondary school-age children feel at having their intimate moments broadcast: everything from potty training incidents gone awry to the buying of that first bra.
In the US, the case of 24-year-old Cam Barrett made headlines in July, after she testified to Washington state legislature about the “psychological harm” her mother had inflicted upon her by eagerly documenting details of her development on MySpace and Facebook – details that included her first period. Now, a bill has been introduced to protect children from their parents’ oversharing tendencies.
In France, meanwhile, parents may soon be banned from sharing images of their children on social media, with Bruno Studer, the French politician who put the bill forward in April declaring: “The message to parents is that their job is to protect their children’s privacy.”
Even very small kids can be more keenly aware of their privacy than some adults. Back in 2016, you may remember sharenter-in-chief Kim Kardashian posting a video of her 3-year-old daughter North West pleading “No! No pictures!” as her mother continued to film her – before sharing the video with her 353 million Instagram followers.
I remember how private my own daughter was about her playtime, not wanting me to watch her, let alone thousands of strangers. I happen to think that something like nightly story time is also too sacred to share, but when Victoria Beckham filmed her husband reading to his daughter, reactions were split between “aw, how sweet” and “poor girl”.
It’s telling that the tech titans who seduced us all into this online world tend to be ferocious about screen time, ban phones from the table, won’t allow their kids on social media – and don’t sharent. Jeff Bezos has always been fiercely private about his children. On the rare occasions Mark Zuckerberg shares pictures of his kids on Instagram, he will conceal their faces, just as Sergei Brin asks media outlets to do with his.
So protective are they about future generations that when, on the birth of his daughter in 2017, Zuckerberg penned an open letter to little August, imploring her to “take time to smell all the flowers” some might have seen this as a bit rich. And it would make a touching image, that, wouldn’t it? Your little one, nose buried in the garden roses. Tempting to stick that on Instagram. After all, what harm could it do? Only time will tell.
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