Sharenting, Explained: How Parents’ Posts Build a Child’s Digital Footprint

TL;DR

• What: “sharenting” means parents sharing photos and information about their children online. Over years, these posts build a detailed digital footprint the child never chose.
• Scale: in a 2010 survey of 2,200 mothers in 10 countries, 81% of children under two already had an online presence. A 2016 UK study found the average parent shares 1,498 photos by a child’s fifth birthday.
• Risks: location and daily routines, identity fraud, children’s photos in AI training data, and AI-generated deepfakes made from ordinary social media pictures.
• Rules: France adopted a law on children’s image rights in February 2024. In Bulgaria, a parent must consent to online services for children under 14.
• What to do: share less identifying detail, post with a delay, check backgrounds and audiences, and involve children as they grow.

Contents

1. What sharenting is
2. How big the digital footprint gets
3. The four main risks
4. What the law says
5. How to share more safely
6. FAQ
7. Vyara’s take

Parents share out of love: first steps, birthdays, first days of school. But today’s children are the first generation whose lives are documented online from before birth. They are born into a public life they never chose.

What sharenting is

“Sharenting” combines “sharing” and “parenting”. It describes parents, and often grandparents and friends, posting photos, videos and details about children on social media, in messaging groups and on public sites.

Each post may look harmless. The concern is the cumulative effect: years of posts that together reveal a child’s appearance, school, routines, location and personal details.

How big the digital footprint gets

The four main risks

1. Location and daily routines

School uniforms, street signs, building numbers and “first day of school” photos reveal where a child spends time. Combined over months, they can reveal routines. Real-time posting adds where the family is right now. Original photo files can also contain location data; major social networks usually strip it, but files sent by email or as chat documents may keep it.

2. Identity fraud

A name, date of birth and address are often enough to start building a fraudulent identity. In 2018, Barclays forecast that sharenting could account for two-thirds of identity fraud facing young people by 2030, with potential losses of almost £670 million. This is a forecast, not a measured outcome.

3. AI training data

In 2024, Human Rights Watch reviewed less than 0.0001% of LAION-5B, a dataset of 5.85 billion image-text pairs used to train AI models. It found 170 identifiable photos of Brazilian children and 190 of Australian children, including some posted under strict privacy settings. Images can be removed from a dataset, but models already trained on them cannot simply unlearn them.

4. Deepfakes and face search

In September 2023, in Almendralejo, Spain, more than 20 girls received AI-generated fake nude images of themselves, created from fully clothed photos taken from their Instagram accounts. Separately, face-search tools can match a photo of a face to publicly available images and profiles, which makes a large photo archive of a child easier to connect to their identity later.

What the law says

• France: Law No. 2024-120 of 19 February 2024 requires parents to protect their child’s image rights jointly and to involve the child according to age and maturity. If parents disagree, a family judge can forbid one parent from publishing images.
• Bulgaria: under Article 25c of the Personal Data Protection Act, processing the data of a child under 14 based on consent, for online services offered directly to them, is lawful only with the consent of a parent.

In most countries, the law sets a framework but does not decide individual posts. Those decisions remain with parents and relatives.

How to share more safely

1. Apply the “would I want this” test: would you want this photo of yourself at that age posted without your consent?
2. Keep routines private: no schools, training times, schedules or addresses in public posts.
3. Check the background: logos, street signs, building numbers and car plates.
4. Post with a delay: share holiday photos after you return.
5. Avoid intimate moments: bath time, nudity and embarrassing situations.
6. Control the audience: use properly configured private lists, not public profiles, and remember that anyone can take a screenshot.
7. Ask the child once they are old enough, and agree on rules with grandparents and friends.
8. Review what is already online: archive or delete uncertain posts, and report images that appear where they shouldn’t. In Bulgaria, the National Safer Internet Centre runs an anonymous helpline on 124 123.

FAQ

Vyara’s take

“Sharing comes from love, not carelessness. But a child doesn’t choose to be born into a public life. I’m not saying never post – I’m saying post with a thought first. One message to a mother in a neighbourhood group was enough for her to delete a post that revealed her child’s whole routine. Sometimes that’s all it takes.”

Further reading: Before you post your child online – Vyara Stefcheva’s personal article on stefcheva.com.

Sources: AVG survey on TechSpot · Parent Zone and Nominet study on Telecompaper · Nominet parents survey 2018 · Barclays forecast on 4NI · Human Rights Watch findings on Scripps News · Euronews on the Almendralejo case · French law 2024-120 overview · Bulgarian Personal Data Protection Act · National Safer Internet Centre

About the Author

Vyara Stefcheva

Vyara Stefcheva is the founder and editor of Egorithms and an independent marketing expert. She follows how technology, AI and algorithms change the way people find, choose and buy, and writes about what that means for businesses and for the people who use them.

She has spent her career building marketing and business strategies for more than 300 brands across three continents. She built and exited a marketing agency and now works independently. She has taught more than 20,000 people through lectures, courses and corporate training, and speaks at conferences about AI and the future of the internet.

On her YouTube channel she tests new AI and marketing tools as they launch and gives each an independent verdict: adopt, watch or ignore.

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