How parents can share smarter on social media
[Music]
i’ve been an attorney since 2004
a mom since 2007 and a photographer
since
- 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
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
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