The “Sharented” Child: Erosion of Privacy Through Over-ExposureThe “Sharented” Child: Erosion of Privacy Through Over-Exposure

Written by: Shany Raitsin current 3L at the Lincoln Alexander School of Law, and the President & Co-Founder of the Property Law Society

I wrote this paper for my Privacy Law Class at the Lincoln Alexander School of Law, around 1 year ago. I submitted this paper to the 17th Annual Canadian Law Student Conference hosted by University of Windsor Faculty of Law. The paper was accepted, and I was honoured to be able to present it at the conference this month, where I also won the Best Presenter Award.

I started off my presentation by beginning at the very end of my paper, where I talk about my 11 year old sister. She was sitting beside me at the time of writing this paper, and began asking me questions about what a “sharented” child even was. I explained to her that the practice of “sharenting” involves parents collecting, and distributing sensitive content regarding their children across internet platforms. Seeing as she was so curious, I asked her a hypothetical question, “How would you feel if mom and dad put a camera in your face every day and asked you to be a part of something like that?” And my 11 year old sister responded, “It would be like saying yes to a contract you’ve never even read and don’t know how to read.”. Thereby perfectly encapsulating why these children must be protected.

The practice of “sharenting” involves parents collecting, and distributing sensitive content regarding their children across internet platforms. Sharented children have had their privacy eroded so that they are made all too accessible to the public, resulting in a kind of snowglobe environment, where everyone can peer in. Law and regulatory regimes have long lagged behind the advancement of social media and technology, which has had a profound impact on the exploitation of children through practices such as sharenting. 

Back to the Days of Shirley Temple

The early 1930’s observed America’s first child star, and she was hard not to love. Shirley Temple was known for her signature ringlets, dimples, and her star power. Temple achieved star status on the heels of projects like “Baby Burlesks”, a short film series featuring a cast of toddlers in diapers acting out strange grown-up plots. In the series, 3 year old Temple can be seen exchanging kisses for candy, telling people she’s “expensive” as if she were hinting at being a prostitute. 

Temple confessed in her adulthood that the Baby Burlesks were a “cynical exploitation of our childish innocence”. Hollywood had found its little Lolita, and kept her mold to be reused by a slew of future child stars. 

But Hollywood did not stay an unfettered wild west for long, and by the early 2000s, trade unions like the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists (ACTRA) advocated for the National Commercial Agreement (NCA) to ensure that 25% of child actors’ earnings were set aside and held in a trust available to them to access when they reached the age of majority. Under the Independent Production Agreement (IPA), children under 12 may only work 8 hours (plus one for lunch), and under the NCA, the same applies to children 15 and under. Additionally, child performers in Ontario are protected under the Protecting Child Performers Act 2015 (PCPA). The central purpose of the PCPA is to “promote the best interests, protection and well-being of child performer”, and stipulates requirements regarding parental accompaniment, chaperones, the right to refuse work, tutoring, healthy food on set, etc.  

Exploitation in the realm of child acting may just come with the territory, but at the very least there is existing regulation to ensure they have some form of protection. Children born into the world of extreme sharenters however are not afforded this right. They are not sheltered from exhaustion or being overworked, they are not provided chaperones, the profit made off of their own image is not secured in any way, and it seems that oftentimes the refusal of work (i.e. appearing in front of the camera for a video/vlog) is simply not an option. The sharented child is not safeguarded by regulation, nor do they have a home to escape to if the conditions of “set” are uncomfortable in any way. The set is their life, the character is their own identity that they are playing until mom or dad decides to turn the camera off. I have here, pictured on this slide, the YouTube cover photo of a video posted to the Ace Family’s Youtube account. The video is titled “Elle Doesn’t Want to do Youtube anymore”, poking fun at their 2 year old daughter, who was filmed in the video looking tired and grumpy. In another vlog, the father of Elle, Austin McBroom films his daughter, aged 4 at the time, walking into a sex shop and holding and consuming a penis shaped lollipop. The Ace Family channel has come under numerous instances of scandal and criticism, and yet their channel is still growing at a whopping 18 million subscribers. There is very little incentive for Elle’s parents to stop filming her, despite any protests she may vocalize. It is at this point that sharented children like Elle undergo a stripping of privacy so severe that it almost transcends a mere privacy issue, and becomes a human rights issue.

In contemplating privacy as a human rights issue, there are two branches of related ideas; privacy as freedom from society, and privacy as dignity. Privacy as freedom from society entails creating distance between oneself and society and the freedom to be left alone. Privacy as dignity entails protecting community norms which often concern “intimate relationships and public reputation”. In both ideas, there is the prevailing sense that the “home” is at the core of privacy. The private home life that allows for one’s safe retreat from society and its corresponding penetrable gaze. The chilling reality of the child of a sharenter is the destruction of this private “home”, because their private life is often inextricably linked from their public social life online.

What Life is Like in a Fishbowl Home

Many sharenters produce content through family vlogging, a practice that includes filming video diaries about one’s family life and posting it online to platforms like Youtube, Instagram and TikTok. Some mental health professionals have likened family vlogging to living “in a transparent house”, but psychologist Dr. Todd Grande states that he believes it is worse than this. “If their house actually was transparent, then people would have to drive by to see inside”, which Grande calls a “passive loss of privacy”. But in fact, through the constant surveillance and recording of a child’s life and publishing this content to YouTube Grande argues that the sharenters are , “engaging in an active destruction of privacy”. The sharented child loses their ability to retreat from society at large, and loses their ability to keep sensitive matters private. Both the child’s freedom and dignity are eroded upon, each time the camera turns on, which for some children is every single day for multiple hours a day. It’s worse than a glass house, it is a fishbowl that resides on every person’s shelf, waiting to be peered into. 

The average American child of today’s society is no stranger to social media, in fact, by age two, 92% of US children will have an online presence – while a parent’s first post of their child happens when they are around three months old. While some forms of sharenting can provide for meaningful experiences of connection and can result in the formation of supportive communities between parents and children, it also necessarily entails the blurring of public-private boundaries because of its online nature. Sharenting creates a digital dilemma, where in representing their own identity as a parent, the sharenter is also making “public aspects of a (potentially vulnerable) child’s life”. But because of their position as the parent, they are precisely the person “who is primarily responsible for the protection of their child’s privacy.” This is one of the core issues plaguing parenting; the mistaken premise that parents will always be the unfailing and infallible protectors of their child’s privacy. 

The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) in the US “prohibits unfair or deceptive acts or practices in connection with the collection, use, and/or disclosure of personal information from and about children on the Internet”. COPPA applies to every website that collects data from children under the age of 13, including all social media platforms. The Act stipulates that websites must require verifiable parental consent for the collection of personal information of children, and further outlines when and how to obtain verifiable consent from a parent or guardian. While COPPA extends to websites that may attempt to exploit the personal information of children, it fails to consider the fact that in today’s highly digital world, parents are often the ones violating the privacy of their own children. 

The UN has also recognized the child’s right to privacy in Article 16 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, stipulating that “no child shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his or her privacy, family, home or correspondence nor to unlawful attacks on his or her honor and reputation”. However, in countries like the US that recognize children’s right to privacy, the right itself is not absolute and is often limited by free-speech protections. In the US, this protection exists in the form of the First Amendment, and in Canada it exists within section 2(b) of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The overshadowing of a child’s right to privacy with free speech protections is yet another pitfall of existing online children’s privacy regulations. 

Bill C-27’s proposed Consumer Privacy Protection Act (CPPA) aims (in part) to protect minors on the internet by imposing higher standards of diligence and regulation on the collection and processing of their personal information. It should be noted that Bill C-27 is set to impose other privacy standards outside of the scope of children’s privacy as well. It should also be noted however that in following the international trend of safeguarding children’s privacy, the CPPA still misses the key issue of the parent often being a participant in the exploitation of their child’s private information. Under s. 4(a) of the Act, parents/guardians are still authorized to exercise the rights under the CPPA on behalf of their child, including to provide consent on their behalf. There is a caveat to this section, that the minor could object to a parent's authorization and personally exercise those rights if they are “capable of doing so”, which is quite a vague statement in itself. The prevailing sentiment from Acts such as these is that parents are still seen as the protectors of their childrens’ privacy, and skirt the responsibility of regulating situations in which the parent is the exploiter of their childs’ personal information. 

However, under French privacy law, anyone convicted of publishing and distributing images of someone without their consent could face a fine of €45,000 and a year in prison, which would ostensibly apply to parents that publish images of their kids as well. French privacy laws like these make it so that as adults, the children of sharenters could be awarded compensation for photographs which were posted without their consent. One must ask themselves however, if it’s feasible to expect children to take advantage of such laws against their own parents. Would it not be more prudent for the law to take a more active stance on regulating the content itself, rather only focusing on how people might retroactively take such content down? Why is it that there is extensive regulation on children in the film and television industry, but almost none on children in the social media entertainment industry? Why is there no regulation that steps in to guard a child’s privacy and overall safety with regards to extreme sharenting – the kind that is broadcasted over the internet for an audience of millions?

The Spectrum: From Mom’s Private Instagram to Viral Family Channels

While sharenting used to be limited to the kvetching and gossip between mothers over coffee, it has spread like wildfire into virtual public forums with the emergence of the internet. It’s important to recognize that sharenting happens on a spectrum. On the lower impact of the sharenting spectrum, there is perhaps a mother with a private Instagram account that has 30 followers. She has occasionally shared photographs of her son since his birth for a few years to share him with a select group of online family and friends. 

The New York Times actually conducted a series of interviews with such parents, and in one exchange, a girl around the age of 13 confronts her mother about how she had posted a photograph of her in a bikini without the daughter’s consent. The daughter expresses her worry that someone will see this scantily clad photo of herself and think about violating her. The Mom pushes back, and points out that her daughter wears bikinis on the beach all the time anyway, and asks what the difference is. The daughter says, “the difference is that you’re my mom.”. Even small scale privacy violations are worth considering in the broader picture of sharenting. Children are becoming increasingly aware of “the implications of the digital footprint”, they have opinions about how their private information is shared across the internet – they want to have veto power. The question is whether the law will actually empower them with it. 

Dr. Todd Grande explains that “just like extreme isolation is harmful, extreme exposure is harmful too”. ‘8 Passengers’ is a family vlogging channel on Youtube that captures the lives of Kevin and Ruby and their six children. Their youngest daughter Eve who was 5 years old at the time was told by Ruby (on camera) that she was responsible for making and packing her own lunch. Ruby recorded herself scoffing when Eve’s teachers contacted her, concerned when Eve showed up without lunch. The teachers asked Ruby to bring Eve lunch so she could have food for the day, and Ruby tells the teachers that they are not to get involved and Eve is to face the consequences of forgetting to pack her own lunch. “Hopefully no one gives her food and steps in to give her a lunch” says Ruby to the camera. Not only is the documentation of this neglectful parenting troubling, it is also a violation of the childrens’ privacy. [I would also like to add that since writing this paper in 2023, Ruby Franke has since been formally charged with six counts of aggravated child abuse and has been sentenced to up to 30 years in prison. As a result, through a court order, the 8 passengers account was removed.]

To deconstruct how the persistent documentation of a child’s life for social media can be damaging, we can start with Ruth Gavison’s methodology of privacy, which describes the notion of how one might experience the “perfect privacy”. The idea of perfect privacy splinters off into three components;

1. no one has information about you (secrecy),

2. no one pays any attention to you (anonymity), and

3. no one has physical access to you (solitude).

It’s just as impossible to have perfect secrecy, anonymity, and solitude at all times, as it is to have none of it, so Gavison proposes that these three components can color the conversation about the “loss” of privacy, rather than the absolute disappearance of it. It is true after all that even the children of the most prolific and abusive sharenters have some degree of privacy from the public, but it is also true that these children often lose access to components of privacy that make their world quite transparent. Sharenting doesn’t just wreak havoc on one of the three pillars that Gavison names, but it often bulldozes all three in a traumatic way. 

Suddenly, the child in question has forfeited a great chunk of secrecy, anonymity, and solitude for their own parents’ gain. In a way, children of extreme sharenters like 8 Passengers face a completely different private reality than “regular” children. They face:

1) publicity, where everyone has information about them,

2) notoriety, where they are put at the center of attention to be an entertaining spectacle, and

3) are surrounded, through them being made more accessible as a result of being sharented. 

However, not all invasions of privacy have to do with a violation of human dignity. At the core of privacy violations is how accessible a person is being made to the public without their consent. It would be difficult to ascertain whether any child under the age of majority is capable of consenting to having their entire life documented, shared, and profited off of by their own parents. Some of these sharenters lead relatively picture perfect lives, like the Labrant Family on Youtube that have a whopping 13 million subscribers (followers). Their four young children have been filmed almost daily for the majority of their lives, with the youngest three being filmed since their birth. Mostly happy moments of the children have been captured, moments that the parents could likely look fondly back on once their children are grown. But no one asks these children if they are still okay with having a camera in their face for their entire formative years, or whether they are capable of understanding the ramifications of having their lives shared for strangers to see. 

The Gross Reality

The disgusting reality is that extreme sharenters (either knowingly or unknowingly) often make highly attractive content for pedophiles. Internet sleuths have dug into the TikTok account Wren Eleanor, a three year old girl who has been filmed for the internet by her mother Jacquelyn since Wren was an infant. The account has over 17 million followers. One sleuth noted that a video of Wren wearing a cropped orange shirt was saved over 45,000 times, while a video of her eating a hot dog was saved 375,000 times. At one point, some of the top searches for Wren on TikTok were “wren eleanor scandalous outfit”. In another video, Jacquelyn hands Wren a razor to see what she would do with it, and Wren proceeds to pretend to shave her private parts with the razor. Where exactly should the line be drawn between harmless family vlogging, and borderline child pornography? US federal child pornography laws apply to “any parent, legal guardian, or person having custody or control of a minor who knowingly permits such minor to engage in, or to assist any other person to engage in, sexually explicit conduct for the purpose of producing any visual depiction of such conduct or for the purpose of transmitting a live visual depiction of such conduct.” – Are parents exempt from these kinds of laws even if they have made such explicit, inappropriate content of their children, and touted it around social media to millions of followers? 

The reality of living in today’s world is that sharenting content is rife with child exploitation material, where even seemingly innocent images can easily end up on the darkest of pedophelic websites.  There needs to be a bigger push to bring the world of influencer media, such as family vlogging, into alignment with existing industry norms. Countries like France have stepped in to regulate influencers under the age of 16, modifying French labor law to include requiring parents of these children to set aside a portion of their earnings for later use, and requiring the children to obtain administrative working authorization.

However, even this is not enough to safeguard the privacy of children online, especially if it concerns sharenters. There must be more nuanced regulation that focuses on the nature of sharenting content, perhaps even censoring childrens’ faces in some instances, putting limits on creators being able to monetize content that is almost entirely centered on their children, putting algorithms in place that flag and remove this content, and possibly even introducing fines that are placed on parents who exploit their children’s privacy online to an extreme degree. I worry that if substantive legal consequences aren’t introduced, the parents of sharented children will not stop exploiting their children for profit. Not even if they know that pedophiles curate and distribute their content. I worry about this, because it is already happening to children like Elle, Wren Eleanor, and so many others.

Works Cited

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