What are the limits and risks of exposing children on the internet – 07/11/2023 – Equilíbrio

“Not even Zuck trusts his social network to show his daughters’ faces”. Comments like that popped up on Mark Zuckerberg’s Instagram last week, when the CEO of Meta released a photo covering his 6- and 7-year-old daughters’ faces with emojis. Although the businessman has already shown the girls other times (almost always in profile and from the back) and has not hidden the baby daughter, the fact sparked a discussion about the risks of excessive exposure of children on the internet.

A survey by Kaspersky, a data security company, found that in 2017, 73% of Latin American parents shared photos and videos of their children online. The controversy has a name: “sharenting”, which unites the English terms “share” (sharing) and “parenting”. The subject challenges experts in law, data security and child development: to what extent can publishing information about a child affect the construction of their self-image and even compromise their privacy?

The risks of this happening are great, points out lawyer Ramon Costa, specialist in compliance and protection of personal data. “Once you publish content, you completely lose control of what becomes of it. No matter how much you remove it, a simple print can immortalize it”, he says.

One of the risks of this is the inclusion of photos – edited or not – in pedophile image banks, a practice carried out by criminals. That’s what happened to Amanda Morgan, 32, in the UK. In an interview with the British newspaper Metro, she says she discovered that photos of her baby daughter posted on her Facebook were circulating on a Russian child abuse website. Still according to the mother, the child’s face was edited to look like she was wearing makeup.

The danger is global: according to a survey by the Internet Watch Foundation, which monitors illegal activities in the digital environment, the number of photos with nudity or sexual content of children between 7 and 10 years old on the internet increased by 360% between 2020 and 2022.

In addition to the leak of images to criminal websites, there is also the risk that children are monitored with the support of facial recognition tools, such as Pim Eyes, which performs a reverse photo search. Depending on the information provided by the publications, it is possible that abusers are able to map the routine and location of the little ones, such as where they live and study, for example.

Another problem associated with “sharing” has to do with the autonomy and cognitive progress of children. According to psychologist Andressa Engelmann, from the University Hospitals Cajuru and São Marcelino Champagnat, in Curitiba, specialists in child development contraindicate exposure on networks until early adolescence. “The consequences of early disclosure are not adequately processed by children, who lack several steps in their development to be able to carry out this task”, she says.

Depending on the degree of exposure, the child may face self-image problems, adds pedagogue Karin Christina Gonçalves, doctoral candidate in Educational Technology at the University of Salamanca, in Spain. At school, she may be bullied or, at the other extreme, be placed in positions of leadership and prominence for which she is not always prepared, since her training is still in its infancy. The context tends to get in the way even of school performance.

It is for reasons like this that France, the first country to regulate the activities of child influencers, launched a bill to prohibit guardians from sharing photos of their children without their permission. The idea is to reduce abusive exposure, especially for commercial use. In the country, more than half of parents have already published photos of their children on the networks, in most cases (91%) before they are 5 years old, according to the Observatory of Parenting and Digital Education in France.

The ANPD (National Data Protection Authority), which regulates the protection of personal information in Brazil, claims to be working on a regulatory project on the processing of data from children and adolescents in Brazil. In a note, the agency said that the process should be completed by 2024.