How parents can share smarter on social media

[Music]

i’ve been an attorney since 2004

a mom since 2007 and a photographer

since

2011. over the years my role as memory

keeper and memory revealer have been

constantly in flux

while sharing my way through motherhood

i began to question whether i was

putting my children’s privacy in

jeopardy

and whether their life stories

were really mind to tell

studying children’s privacy on social

media fed both my personal interests and

my professional passions

so seven years ago i delved deep into

the work of studying the intersection of

a child’s right to privacy and a

parent’s right to share

an area of research that’s often called

sharanting

i’m a former child abuse prosecutor and

i’m currently a law professor

i’m also a photographer

it was my experience of time in the

courtroom my life as an academic

and my day-to-day world as a mom to

three

very photogenic children that led me to

do this work which ultimately led to me

writing a book called growing up shared

that was published last year

i’d like us to first shift our focus

away from where it traditionally centers

instead of focusing on our kids and what

our kids might be doing wrong online

i’d like us to instead look at us adults

and i’d like to talk to you about how

parents might be able to make better

more well-informed decisions when they

choose to share online

and about how policy makers can do a

better job protecting children’s data

when families do make the choice to

share their information on social media

so much attention is focused on our kids

and trying to tell our kids to be better

protectors of their own privacy

but as parents we ultimately only have a

finite amount of control

over what our kids are doing online

but we have full control over our own

choices

isn’t it odd that so much attention is

focused on their bad behavior

and so little

is pointed at our own

our kids have digital identities long

before they first take their first step

on instagram

and here are five things that i think

that we as a society can do to better

protect their privacy

number one

give kids veto power

it’s important that any time we take a

picture of a child and we consider

sharing

we ask them what they think about it and

let them have a say

in which of their stories they share

in which of their pictures they choose

to see let the world see

every time we take a picture of a child

and we post it without asking them

we’re teaching them that when they

become social media users themselves

that they don’t need to ask people

either

but if we take a moment

and we talk to them about it

we have a powerful opportunity

we have an opportunity to talk to them

about consent

we have an opportunity to model respect

and these lessons are going to be

critical for our teens to understand

long before they first log on to

instagram

speaking about instagram

a few years ago when my oldest son was

finally old enough to get instagram

he took a picture and he posted it on

social media without asking me or his

little brother first

i was fine with it because i looked

pretty good in the picture

but his little brother wasn’t so happy

because he wasn’t asked first

and while at first i was really proud of

my seven-year-old at the time to be able

to voice that he was upset that

something had been shared without his

permission

i also wanted to get upset with my then

13 year old for sharing something

without checking

but i had to do a little soul searching

because the truth is

before i started researching sharing

i posted so much online

i had a public blog during the first few

years of his life

so instead of using that first moment of

him sharing without asking his brother

first

i did my best to turn what could have

been a moment to admonish him and tried

to turn it into a teaching moment

one that started with me offering an

apology

and promising to next time try harder to

practice what i preach and by the way

the seven-year-old was very okay with me

sharing this with all of you today just

to be clear

number two

don’t mistake highlight reels for real

memories

it is really easy for me to get sucked

into the instant gratification that

social media offers

but every time we take a picture

and we post it right away online

we miss out on staying in the moment

that we’re in

and we temporarily escape

to our news feeds

we’re also leaving the people that are

right in front of us

and for most of us parents those people

in front of us are often our kids

i think we need to give our kids an

opportunity to make memories that are

not impeded by our use of our digital

devices

a few years ago i was at an event where

my younger son received an award and i

was in the back row with my camera

taking lots of pictures i was really

happy with the pictures i took i got

some great pictures the lighting was

amazing and after the the ceremony was

over the families were socializing the

kids were eating cake and the parents

were talking and i was staring at my

my camera

and i saw a picture that i really wanted

to share with a friend and with his

daughter

so i went up to the family i turned on

my camera and i said look at these

pictures i got of your daughter getting

her award look how cool it is

and the friend was like that’s okay

stacy why don’t you email them to me

she can see it later

my friend wanted his daughter to enjoy

being at the party

wanted her to have the opportunity to

enjoy running around and eating her cake

with her friends she wanted her he

wanted his daughter to remember what it

felt like to be on stage receiving that

award

the bright lights in her eyes the sounds

of her shoes on the floor

looking out into the second row and

seeing her dad

that’s how he wanted his daughter to

remember that moment

not by the view that i captured through

my camera lens in the back of the

auditorium

it turns out that that dad whether he

knew it or not

had a concern that actually had some

scientific basis

it turns out that when we look at an

image really close in time to an event

it changes the way our mind processes

that moment and it can alter our

memories

writing for the new york times julia cho

helped me understand

that when we are constantly documenting

childhood

we are in some ways rewriting childhood

but we want our kids to have memories

that are based on their perceptions

as kids right

like i want my daughter to remember the

first time that she went to disney world

on her own terms

not by the edited and curated view that

i captured and then shared with my

friends on my social media news feed

number three

we need more research to understand the

tangible risks of over sharing

now earlier today i asked you to shift

your focus away from the kids

and instead to focus on us parents

but it’s not about that all about the

parents we can’t do it alone

instead we need lawmakers to use

evidence-based research to enact

policies and laws that better protect

children’s information

there are risks that go along with

oversharing

some of them make for very scary

headlines

their risk that pedophiles are taking

advantage of the pictures that parents

share and using them for bad purposes

one horrifying study that i read when i

started my research said that the

e-safety commissioner of australia

predicted that 50 percent 5-0 50

of all images on pedophile image sharing

sites

had originated on social media and on

parents blogs

there’s also risks that data collectors

are using artificial intelligence to

build digital dossiers on our kids

and they could use those digital

dossiers to sell

or they could also be stolen and our

children’s information could be at risk

the bank barclays has predicted that by

the year 2030

two-thirds of all identity theft will be

able to be tied back to sharonding

these risks are all real and they’re all

concerning

but we really don’t know how common any

of these things are from real valid

scientific studies

and so we need more science so that we

can better empower parents to weigh the

day-to-day benefits that they experience

when they share on social media with the

potential risks that might also exist

when they do it

number four

we may need some more legal remedies for

kids

in my work

i never want to silence a parent’s voice

instead i want to empower parents so

that they can make better sharing

decisions on behalf of their families

but sometimes empowerment comes too late

and information that we share online

about our kids and about ourselves

can outlive its welcome on the internet

and one way that we might be able to

reset the balance

is something that you here in europe

already have

and it’s called the right to be

forgotten

the right to be forgotten is a legal

doctrine that recognizes that after

information is shared

at a certain point it might not any

longer be relevant to the person’s

reputation or to their name and they

might have a right to have that

information basically deleted from the

public sphere

and what the right to be forgotten could

do is that it could allow parents an

opportunity to share their stories

online

but it would also recognize that as kids

get older that right to share

has to be minimized

to make way for the growing and

competing privacy interests of the child

ultimately what this does is it would

allow parents to continue to get the

benefits of sharing of making community

of getting help online

but that if children get to a certain

age they would be able to request

basically a deletion of their of their

google footprint to have that

information that’s shared so if a parent

has shared something and it’s now listed

in a child’s google search result the

child would be able to basically get the

link

between their name and that google

search result broken

now it will be challenging to see a law

like the right to be forgotten get

enacted in the country that i’m from the

united states because in the united

states we have very strong free speech

protections and we strongly value

parental autonomy

but there are other are other areas in

the law where free speech and parental

autonomy

that we make exceptions in the law to

make way for the competing privacy needs

or the safety needs that we have

involved in society

and i believe that this is a

conversation that we need to have

because it might be the only way that we

can better protect kids information when

they get older

number five

see the good

along with taking a lot of pictures of

my own kids i’ve taken many pictures of

many other kids many other families

including children who have faced

chronic illnesses like pediatric cancer

these families have decided to share the

pictures that i’ve taken and i’ve shared

the pictures with their blessing because

they know that so much good

can come from sharing their experiences

with others

these families have seen firsthand how

helpful it’s been for their kids to have

connections to their community outside

the four walls of their hospital room

when we share wholeheartedly

others who are similarly situated can

gain support

and they can gain knowledge

it can help us make connections

in our brick and mortar world

and brand new connections in our virtual

one

when we share about our own experiences

we can raise awareness for important

social justice issues we can raise

funding for important medical research

and we can really make a difference in

the world

through our vulnerability

i’ve experienced this firsthand a few

years ago when my son was bullied in

middle school for being jewish

we first tried to get the situation

resolved

by working with the school board

but when that didn’t work with my son’s

blessing we decided to go onto social

media and to let our community know what

he had been going through

it was scary to take that step

but we really felt stuck

and the response was incredible

one of our friends

got behind him and offered to start a

petition asking our school board to take

all bullying

and specifically anti-semitism more

seriously

and my friend shared that petition

and within just two days in our small

community

over fifteen hundred families fifteen

hundred parents decided to share it jews

and non-jews alike

and when we went to the school board to

tell the school board what our concerns

were

my 13 year old son surprised us all

because he decided that he also wanted

to speak up

and to share what had happened to him

i wasn’t thinking about sharing today

my son told the school board

in front of a packed audience

but then we had a petition

and i decided

that i was ready to share

my son didn’t need my voice anymore

he had found his own

in no small part to the support that he

received on social media

it has been a thrilling ride to sit

with the families that have been raising

kids alongside social media

it’s often been very challenging for to

change my own sharing practices

to model what i’ve now learned through

my research

over the years i’ve recognized that

families don’t overshare online

because they’re trying to be malicious

many just have never yet never

considered the importance

of their child’s digital footprint

and in my 20 years of lawyering in seven

plus years of research

i still make mistakes

there’s so many questions that i still

don’t have answers to

i even struggled to decide what pictures

it would be okay to share here with you

today

even though the photos you’ve seen

i took

and i’m sharing with the parents

blessing

what i’ve discovered is that it is

critical that if we are going to spend

so much time talking about what our kids

are constantly doing wrong online

it’s critical that we take a minute and

point the mirror back at ourselves

that said

sharing should definitely respect a

child’s developmental level

it might be just fine to share more

broadly when our kids are little

but that sharing has to be minimized to

make way for the growing and important

independent needs of that child

as they get older and need their own

autonomy

and maybe it’s about balance

and i’m still looking for it one day a

few years ago my younger son was

featured in a chess tournament on one

local news channel on the same day that

i went on another channel

to talk about children’s

privacy and when i got home

and got him tucked into bed

i shared both my news feature

and his

with my friends on social media

i still occasionally share my younger

son’s gymnastics highlights

i share my daughter’s beautiful artwork

i share my draw my older sons

awesome drum solos

but i always ask them now before i do

and sometimes they come to me

asking me to share

my kids know that i share because i’m

proud of them

but they also know that i’d be proud of

them

even if they didn’t want me to share

and what i do know now with absolute

certainty

is that we need to be thinking about how

we share about our kids we need to be

talking about it and debating it like we

talk about educating our kids like we

talk about how we’re going to keep them

healthy

like we stress out over how much time

our younger kids are spending watching

youtube

and like we have no clue and go back to

the drawing board time after time when

we try to figure out how to keep our

teenagers safe once they get social

media of their own

i hope my research ultimately helps

protect children’s digital footprints

i hope it helps parents share smarter

and that it makes kids feel heard

our kids are the first generation to

grow up shared

and we’re the first generation of

parents to have this task of trying to

raise kids

while having social media

this isn’t easy

we don’t have our life experiences to

guide us and to help us make better

sharing choices

our experiences in the cafeteria don’t

translate well to their experiences on

instagram

but what i do know

is that we’re gonna have to take all

this information in

we’re gonna have to be understanding it

and processing it and seeing how social

media affects our families

and putting our findings into practice

all at once

and that’s hard

but if we sit back

and we wait for our kids

to go through our news feed

and to tell us what they think

about what we’ve shared

well at that point

it will be too late

to step back

and unpublish their childhoods

our kids are counting on us to share

smarter

and to help keep them safe

in a no privacy world

thank you

you