Over at the New York Times, KJ Dell’ Antonia writes about children’s objections to their parents’ sharing on social media of baby pictures etc.:
….there was one surprising rule that the children wanted that their parents mentioned far less often: Don’t post anything about me on social media without asking me.
As in, no pictures of them asleep in the back of the car. No posts about their frustration with their homework. That victory picture after the soccer game? Maybe. The frustrated rant about the fight you just had over laundry? No way.
The answers revealed “a really interesting disconnect,” said Alexis Hiniker, a graduate student in human-centered design and engineering at the University of Washington who led the research. She, along with researchers at the University of Michigan, studied 249 parent-child pairs distributed across 40 states and found that while children ages 10 to 17 “were really concerned” about the ways parents shared their children’s lives online, their parents were far less worried. About three times more children than parents thought there should be rules about what parents shared on social media.
See, Don’t Post About Me on Social Media, Children Say @ New York Times.
We don’t now expect parents to receive permission from their children before posting slice-of-life photos of those children, but I would be surprised if we don’t see efforts in the next decade (however outside the current sense of legitimate American parental activity) to restrict the range of parental postings either legislatively, administratively in child-welfare actions, or in litigation on behalf of children aggrieved over adults’ postings.