Why Parents Should Pause Before Oversharing Online; The New York Times, August 4, 2020

Stacey Steinberg, The New York Times; Why Parents Should Pause Before Oversharing Online

As social media comes of age, will we regret all the information we revealed about our families during its early years?

"A Conflict of Interest

Studying children’s privacy on social media fed both my personal conflicts and my professional passions, so six 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.

What I quickly learned was that the law does not give us much guidance when it comes to how we use social media as families. Societal norms encour­age us to use restraint before publicly sharing personal informa­tion about our friends and family. But nothing stops us as parents from sharing our child’s stories with the virtual world.

While there are laws that protect American children’s privacy in certain contexts — such as HIPAA for health care, FERPA for education and COPPA for the online privacy of children under 13 — they do not have a right to privacy “from their parents,” except in the most limited of circumstances.

Most other countries guarantee a child the right to privacy through an international agreement called the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. The United States signed the agreement, but it is the only United Nations member country not to have ratified it, which means it is not law or formal policy here. Additionally, doctrines like the Right to Be Forgotten might offer children in the European Union remedies for their parents’ oversharing once they come of age."