Sharenting: A Childhood on the Record

Nowadays most children have an audience before they can speak. The great majority already have a digital footprint by the age of two. It is built entirely by the people children trust most: their parents. Parents post their children to share pride and love with family and friends. But the audience is often very different.

The Scale

The exposure starts early. In 2010 the software firm AVG surveyed parents across ten Western countries: it found that 81 percent of children already had an online presence before the age of two. In the United States it reached 92 percent. Around a quarter of them were online before they were born, as ultrasound scans. The average child’s “digital birth” arrived at about six months (AVG, 2010). That was before TikTok existed. A later survey put the number of photographs of the average child posted online before the age of five at close to a thousand (Nominet, 2015). In 2015 Australia’s then Children’s eSafety Commissioner, Alistair MacGibbon, reported that up to half of the material found on some paedophile image-sharing sites had been copied from innocent photographs first posted on social media and family blogs. Most of them were put there by parents (Children and Media Australia, 2015). Unfortunately, the habit has not slowed since. In a 2023 survey carried out for Deutsche Telekom, 86 percent of parents said they post photographs or videos of their children online. Most of those with children aged five or under do so at least once a week (Deutsche Telekom, 2023). UNICEF gets straight to the heart of the problem: the footprint adults build for a child can shape that child’s reputation and safety for life, long before the child can understand any of it (UNICEF, n.d.).

Who Is Really Watching

In one Telegram group with more than 4,000 members, men kept track of nearly 700 children. None of them had been kidnapped: their parents were posting them on Instagram and the men exchanged information on which parents seemed willing to sell more. Unfortunately some did: extra photographs, private chat sessions, even the leotards their daughters had worn (Valentino-DeVries & Keller, 2024). This comes from an investigation by The New York Times into girl influencer accounts run by their mothers. It shows the darkest side of a habit most families see as harmless: sharenting. As early as 2017, the legal scholar Stacey Steinberg pointed to its central paradox. Parents are supposed to protect their child’s privacy, yet they are also the people most likely to give it away (Steinberg, 2017).

Since then, one thing above all has changed: who is watching. The New York Times examined thousands of child accounts. Audience-analysis firms counted 32 million connections to male followers for 5,000 of them. Men made up about a third of the audience. On accounts with more than 100,000 followers the male share often rose above 75 percent. On a few it passed 90 percent. Subscriptions offering extra photos cost between 0.99 and 19.99 dollars a month. Comments from men ranged from admiring to explicit. Some moved on to bullying and blackmail aimed at obtaining more provocative images. One mother received messages threatening to “make your life hell” for her and her daughter. The Canadian Centre for Child Protection identified child sexual abuse imagery involving several underage Instagram models. Meta said that parents are responsible for the accounts and can delete them at any time. Yet an internal Meta study from 2020 had estimated that 500,000 child accounts received “inappropriate” interactions every single day (Valentino-DeVries & Keller, 2024).

The same pattern came to light in 2022 around a three-year-old girl whose mother’s TikTok account had more than seventeen million followers. A video of the toddler eating had been saved almost 375,000 times. Another one of her (in a cropped shirt) had been saved more than 45,000 times. Strangers were searching the platform for more of her (KTVU, 2022). The videos were innocent. The saving was not.

The Algorithm Does the Rest

Many parents think that only someone who goes looking will find their child. In practice the platforms do the finding. In 2023 The Wall Street Journal created test accounts that followed young gymnasts, cheerleaders and other preteen and teenage influencers. Instagram’s Reels algorithm responded by serving risqué footage of children alongside openly sexual adult videos, while advertisements from major brands ran in between. The child accounts the testers followed were also followed by accounts belonging to adult men. The Canadian Centre for Child Protection reported similar results from its own tests, and several advertisers then suspended spending or raised the issue with Meta. Meta called the experiment “manufactured” (MediaPost, 2023). This lesson is uncomfortable but simple for every parent: a public video from a gymnastics class or a dance performance can be automatically delivered to the viewers it should never reach.

From Snapshot to Abuse

Artificial intelligence has made the danger far worse. In a single month in 2023 the Internet Watch Foundation, the British charity that hunts child sexual abuse material online, found 20,254 AI-generated images on one dark web abuse forum. Its analysts examined 11,108 of them. Nearly 3,000 broke UK law (The Decoder, 2023). Two years later the scale had shifted again. In 2025 the foundation confirmed 3,443 AI-generated child sexual abuse videos. That is more than 260 times the number found the year before. Ninety-seven percent of the AI-generated abuse images that it assessed showed girls. And these girls are not always imaginary: the foundation warned that AI is being used to manipulate images of real children (Internet Watch Foundation, n.d.).

Same Data, Another Crime

A child’s identity is a perfect target: a real name, a real date of birth and a clean financial record that nobody will check for eighteen years. A Carnegie Mellon CyLab study of more than 40,000 children found that 10.2 percent of them already had someone else using their social security number: a rate 51 times higher than for adults (Carnegie Mellon CyLab, 2011). The scale is not hypothetical. In 2017 alone more than a million American children had their identities stolen. Two-thirds of them were under eight. Their families paid more than $540 million out of their own pockets to repair the damage (Javelin, 2018). Yet only about a third of German parents surveyed knew that a single photograph can be enough to make a child a victim of identity theft (Deutsche Telekom, 2023). Every birthday post, every full name, school and hometown dropped into a caption helps a fraudster. The bank Barclays has projected that by 2030 sharenting could lie behind up to 7.4 million cases of online identity fraud and cost young people around £676 million a year (Barclays, 2018). A child whose details are copied at four may not find out until eighteen, when a first loan or phone contract is suddenly refused.

From Family Album to Courtroom

The first generation raised online is now old enough to object. In 2017 a sixteen-year-old in Mantua, Italy, took his own mother to court over the photographs of him that she had posted. The judge ordered her to delete them and banned her from posting more. If she broke the order, she faced a 10,000 euro penalty (Euronews, 2018). In 2023 Illinois became the first American state to guarantee child influencers a share of the money their parents earn from posting them (Fortune, 2023). In February 2024 France passed a law obliging parents to protect their child’s image rights and allowing judges to intervene (Bird & Bird, 2024b).

European data law offers only partial protection. The General Data Protection Regulation sets a digital age of consent, which Poland, for example, has fixed at sixteen. There is a catch, though. The regulation does not apply to purely personal or household activity, the so-called “household exemption”. This means a family’s private sharing usually stays outside its reach. Poland relies on older tools and on persuasion: a person’s image is protected under the Copyright Act of 1994. The Ombudsman for Children and the data-protection authority UODO have campaigned together against the over-posting of children’s photographs, and a 2024 UODO guide urges parents to put the child’s best interest first (Bird & Bird, 2024a). For Ukrainian and Polish families now spread across the European Union, who stay close to relatives through photos, this is anything but an abstract question.

Before You Post

Child-protection organisations, including UNICEF, urge parents to think about privacy before they post (UNICEF, n.d.). In practice that means keeping children’s accounts and family albums private and checking who follows them. A follower list full of unknown adult men is a warning, not a compliment. It means not posting children publicly in swimwear, sports kit or dance videos. It means leaving full names, schools, birthdays and real-time locations out of captions. It also means never selling subscriptions, private photos or clothing linked to a child. Sexualised comments and messages should be reported, not quietly deleted. Any attempt at pressure or blackmail should go to the police. And once a child is old enough to understand, parents should ask before posting.

Conclusion: The Person Holding the Phone

Investigations, court cases and watchdog data all point the same way: ordinary family photos are being collected, sexualised and rewritten by people parents will never meet, often with advertising running alongside. Laws are starting to respond: slowly and mostly after the damage is done. Until they catch up, the first line of protection is not a regulator or an algorithm. It is the person holding the phone.