1 / 18

Sharenting: Balancing the conflicting rights of parents and children

Sharenting: Balancing the conflicting rights of parents and children. Claire Bessant Northumbria University. What is sharenting?. ‘the habitual use of social media to share news , images, etc of one’s children’ ( Top 10 Collins Words of the Year 2016). The statistics.

davishenry
Download Presentation

Sharenting: Balancing the conflicting rights of parents and children

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Sharenting: Balancing the conflicting rights of parents and children Claire BessantNorthumbria University

  2. What is sharenting? ‘the habitual use of social media to share news, images, etc of one’s children’ (Top 10 Collins Words of the Year 2016)

  3. The statistics • 42% of UK parents sharent - 56% never blog or post photographs or videos of their children online (OFCOM, Communications Market Report 2017) • The average UK parent shares almost 1,500 images of their child online before their 5th birthday (Parentzone (2016) https://parentzone.org.uk/article/average-parent-shares-almost-1500-images-their-child-online-their-5th-birthday) • By the age of two more than 80% of UK children and over 90% of American children have an online presence due to parental disclosures (AVG (2010) reported Digital Birth: Welcome to the Online World http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20101006006722/en/Digital-Birth-Online-World) • More than 4 million US parents read or write blogs (Blum-Ross and Livingstone, ‘Sharenting’, parent blogging and the boundaries of the digital self)

  4. Why parents • To celebrate children’s achievements • To maintain and facilitate contact with distant relatives and friends • To share their own experience as parents and receive validation of their parenting • To seek and to share parenting advice • To avoid isolation and connect with similar parents • To obtain emotional and practical support • To advocate for particular parenting practices • To earn an income (Steinberg ‘Sharenting: Children’s Privacy in the Age of Social Media’; CS Mott Children’s Hospital Poll on Children’s Health; Livingstone and Blum-Ross ‘Sharenting, Parent Blogging and the boundaries of the digital self; Kumar and Schoenebeck ‘The Modern Day Baby Book’; Orton-Johnson ‘Mummy blogs and representations of motherhood’)

  5. The child’s perspective

  6. Sharenting: The Negatives • ‘Oversharenting’: sharenting of too much/embarrassing information • Information and photographs (including metadata) may reveal a child’s location, appearance, school and friends, may be altered and used for illegal websites, or can result in bullying • Harm caused by ‘pranks’ and verbal abuse online, or by ‘shaming’

  7. Children’s rights in the sharenting context • Right to respect for private life (Article 8 ECHR, Article 7 EU Charter) • Right to privacy (UNCRC Art 16; UDHR Art 12) • Right to preserve one’s own identity (Art 8 UNCRC) • Right to Data Protection (Art 8 EU Charter) • Right to have the state/courts treat the child’s best interests as a primary consideration (Art 3 UNCRC) • A right to protection from harm (Article 19 UNCRC)

  8. … versus Parental rights

  9. How can a child remove sharented information and/or prevent sharenting? • Ask their parents • Use social media providers’ take down procedures • Ask the Information Commissioner for assistance • Seek an injunction

  10. Sharenting parents should be aware of their obligations under the Data Protection Act 1998

  11. Children’s remedies under the DPA • Ask the ICO to assess whether processing breaches the DPA (s42). If so, the ICO may serve an enforcement notice (s40) • Serve a notice requesting information be taken down on the basis of unwarranted and substantial damage or distress. If parents refuse the child may ask the court to order parents to comply (s10) BUT • The ICO will not consider complaints against individuals who have posted data whilst acting in a personal capacity, no matter how unfair, derogatory or distressing the posts (Personal and Household Exemption at Article 3(2) Directive & Section 36 DPA; ICO (2014) Social Networking and Online Forums)

  12. ‘Old-fashioned’ duty of confidence • Information must be of a confidential nature (not trivial, not public) • Information to be imported in circumstances imposing obligation of confidence • Unauthorised disclosure (ie no consent, not in public interest, no legal obligation to disclose) (Coco v A N Clarke [1969] FSR 415; Saltman Engineering Co Ltd v Campbell Engineering Co Ltd (1948) 65 RPC 203)

  13. Is the information that parents share ‘their information’ or their children’s? (Blum-Ross ‘Sharenting: Parent Bloggers and managing children’s digital footprints) How much of the information sharented will be deemed ‘confidential’? What about shared experiences with parents, in public, with friends? (Woodward v Hutchins, McKennitt v Ash) If confidential information has been widely shared online it arguably then becomes public … what benefit will an injunction then serve (Giggs v NGN)

  14. Tort of Misuse of Private Information Child must show they had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the information disclosed AND Child must show that when their Article 8 privacy rights are balanced against their parent’s right to Freedom of Expression (Art 10 ECHR) and right to family life (Art 8 ECHR) the child’s rights trump the parent’s rights (Campbell v MGN [2004] UKHL 22)

  15. A reasonable expectation of privacy? • An objective test - Consider claimant’s attributes, nature of activity and of intrusion, absence of consent, effect on claimant (Murray) • Note that children are less able to determine when their information is used and more at risk of harms such as bullying, embarrassment, threats to safety (Weller) • Whose expectation? Conflation in case law between children’s expectations and expectations of the child’s parents (Weller, AAA, Murray, Reklos and Davourlis, Bogomolova) • What is the ‘norm’? Is privacy dead? Media headlines suggest the answer is yes but 2017 OFCOM Communications report suggests not

  16. Balancing children’s rights and parents’ rights Privacy v Freedom of Expression Individual privacy v Family privacy Parents have primary responsibility for children’s upbringing (Article 19 UNCRC) Parents have rights to determine how family information is used (Weller, Murray, AAA) BUT parents do not always act in their children’s best interests Limits to Art 8 right to respect for family life (Re F) (where parent/child conflict children’s best interests a primary consideration) • Neither right has precedence (Re S) • Primacy of child’s interests means where child’s interests adversely affected they must be given considerable weight (Weller) • Online discussion cannot be allowed to go so far as to prejudice the rights of individual children (Re J) • ‘Low level communications’ of personal not public importance – limited contribution to general debate

  17. Should children be able to sue their parents? What arethe alternatives?

  18. Thank you claire.bessant@northumbria.ac.uk

More Related