Respecting Children's Privacy Online

A couple of years ago, a study came out that said 92% of children in the U.S. under age two already had a digital "footprint" of some kind — from photos and albums of themselves posted online to email addresses to full-on social network profiles. The study, by Internet security firm AVG, found that 34% of U.S. children had an online presence even before they were born, thanks to sonograms posted by their parents — a "digital birth" before their own actual births.

What happens when these kids grow up? When they reach tweendom, say, and are old enough to see and understand this online documentation of their childhoods? Will they flinch at the anecdotes their parents shared on social media sites — not to mention all the comments their parents' friends and followers posted in response? Since they had no control over creating these early online profiles (they certainly didn't post those toddler shots of themselves with food all over their faces), how will they feel about them?

In the February 4 TODAY Moms article "Sharing 'Cute' Naked Photos of Your Kids Online: Just Don't", Carolyn Savage tells the story of when she came across naked pictures of herself as a baby — the old fashioned print kind — when she was 11. "My immediate reaction was to hide every last one of the photos," Savage writes. "As innocent as the pictures were, in my pre-pubescent mind, no one — not even my parents — had a right to possess pictures of me with no clothes on. My body was mine and at that point in my life, I wanted to keep my body private."

And these were just her mom's personal collection of family pics. Savage's piece was sparked by a recent outcry over one mom blogger posting a picture on Instagram of her naked 3-year-old in the tub. The blogger has over 20,000 followers, and while some defended her posting, many were outraged by it, citing pedophiles and child pornographers as well as her toddler's own right to privacy. (The blogger has since taken the photo down.)

For many parents, posting naked photos, even of babies, crosses a line. Many understand that once a photo is out there, it's out there, and there's no real way to know or control who ends up getting access to it or what they might use it for. A poll accompanying Savage's article on TODAY Moms asks, "Is it OK to share naked photos of your kids online?" As of this posting, 86% had clicked "No; children have a right to privacy, too," while just 14% clicked "Yes! They're cute, and it's all in good fun."

But nakedness is just one thing to consider. In the February 1 Time.com piece "Are You Guilty of 'Oversharenting'? Why We Owe Our Kids Online Privacy," Carolyn Jones notes that college admissions officers and hiring managers "regularly research their potential candidates online." This could include whatever a candidate's parents might have publicly written about him or her in the past.

Jones also discusses identity theft: "All a fraudster needs is a child’s name, birth date and address — details that can be cherry-picked off unsecured social-media profiles — and they can commit identify theft that won’t be discovered until the child is much older," she writes.

In its "Online Reputation Guide for College-Bound Students," SafetyWeb, a service from Experian, notes: "A digital footprint can last a lifetime unless an individual diligently practices online reputation management (monitoring)." But how can a teen control the online "reputation" his or her parents created years ago? What about the children whose parents regularly blog about their lives, sharing all manner of growing-up stories with the online world at large? All that commentary about what little Amy did today won't go away when Amy grows up.

"The more of our lives we put online from the beginning, the more there is to contend with later on," Steven Leckart wrote last May in The Wall Street Journal article "The Facebook-Free Baby." In this piece — in which he famously coined the term "oversharenting" — Leckart described his decision not to post anything about his infant son on Facebook, including photos. "It's not that I want my son to remain hidden from the world," he wrote. "I just want him to inherit a decision instead of a list of passwords and default settings. If he takes part in social media, he'll eventually do so on his own terms, not mine."

Savage at TODAY Moms asks a simple but important question: "When does a child's right to privacy trump a parent's desire to share?" It's a question each parent needs to answer for himself or herself. Facebook's ever-changing privacy settings may be a pain to navigate, but parents should take the time to understand them and decide what they want to share with whom. Will they share photos of their kids with private lists of close friends and family or with all 500 Facebook friends? Will they post their children's full names, first and last? If they blog about their child's life, will they use his or her real name? The YouTube videos are certainly adorable — but do parents want these to be part of their children's online profiles forever?

These are individual decisions. But they're decisions that could have important consequences, both today and down the road. Facebook has only been around since 2004. It will still be a few years before the first generation of kids who had their sonograms posted to the site are even officially old enough to use it.