Should parents share photos of their children online? Where to draw the line with sharenting

I came into this conversation for selfish reasons. I have an eight-year-old, and I'd been getting increasingly concerned about what I was seeing in the news and online. I wanted to protect my family, and I wanted an expert to tell me how.

Lisa Ventura MBE is the founder of the AI and Cybersecurity Association, and she spends a lot of her time raising awareness about online safety, particularly where children's images are concerned. So I started with the big question: how safe are the images of children that we post on social media?

She was direct.

Despite having all the privacy controls at our disposal, they are not, and nothing is 100% safe. The moment you post an image online, you lose control of that image.

What is sharenting?

Sharenting is the word for parents sharing their children's lives online: the photos, the milestones, the funny stories, the hard days. Most of us do it without thinking, because everyone does it. Lisa's point is that we've normalised something that, described to someone 30 years ago, would sound quite dystopian.

We're creating comprehensive visual databases of our children's entire lives. Their locations, their routines, their vulnerabilities. And that data is being handed to corporations whose business model is to monetise attention. As Lisa put it, the real question isn't how safe the images are. It's why we ever thought doing this was normal.

I felt that. When I post about my son, I'm telling the world what he likes, what he doesn't like, the school he goes to, how he reacts when something goes wrong. There's no real privacy in it. We're showing the highlight reel and the lowlight reel, and we're building his digital footprint before he's old enough to know what one is.

The risks of sharing children's photos online

Lisa laid out the risks on a few different levels, and none of them are abstract.

• Data harvesting. Every image you upload can be analysed by AI: facial recognition, location metadata, object detection. A first-day-of-school photo in uniform can identify the school your child goes to. Their face can become part of a training data set, shared with or sold to governments, advertisers and surveillance companies.
• Permanence. That photo will follow your child around. Universities and employers look at social media. Imagine being 15 and someone finding the photos your parents posted of you in nappies, or a post describing your ADHD diagnosis in detail. You'd have zero control over your own narrative.
• AI-enabled abuse. There are openly available tools that can take a child's face from an innocent playground photo and place it in sexualised content. Deepfakes used to require expertise. Now there are apps that do it instantly, and the source material is often our Instagram feeds.
• Behavioural predictability. When we document a child's school, routines and emotional vulnerabilities, we're creating a handbook for anyone who might want to exploit that child in future.

That last one, and the sexualised images, terrify me. So I asked the question every parent asks: surely if I stick an emoji over his face, or cover the logo on his uniform, I'm protecting him?

Sharing children's personal information online: the emoji myth

There's a myth around this, and even celebrities fall for it. Lisa mentioned Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, who famously shared photos from a trip to Disney World with emojis over their children's faces. On the surface it looks like the face is hidden.

But there are AI tools that can remove that emoji and, from whatever information is out there in the public domain, produce what they believe that child looks like. Sharing children's personal information online, even with the face covered, still doesn't give you anything close to full privacy. And we can only assume these tools will get smarter.

Children's consent to sharing photos: can an eight-year-old say yes?

This is the bit I really wanted to explore. I'm trying to teach my son about consent and agency, where appropriate for a child. But does a child really give you consent to share a photo online? Do they have the cognitive understanding? Or are we projecting consent onto our children because we want to post something?

Lisa agreed. An eight-year-old won't understand that a photo can exist forever, or how it might affect them at 14, 24 or 34. And even with teenagers, are we genuinely giving them the freedom to say no, or asking in a way that makes clear we expect a yes?

Her view is that parents need to come at it from a few angles: explaining the consequences fully when children are old enough to understand, giving them real freedom to say no, and letting them withdraw that consent at any time. We have to be their advocates in this, and manage it for them until they can manage it themselves.

Children's right to privacy on social media: whose story is it?

We had this conversation in the light of the Brooklyn Beckham statement, which I'd read and reread. One line sent alarm bells off for me:

For my entire life, my parents have controlled narratives in the press about our family. The performative social media posts, family events and inauthentic relationships have become a fixture of the life I was born into.

None of us are living at Beckham levels of fame. But on a small scale, it felt familiar. We use our children to project the perfect life we're living. And when parents control a child's narrative to that extent, Lisa said, they're essentially telling the world: the public version of you is mine to create. That child doesn't get to decide which moments are private and which struggles stay within the family.

Lisa has lived this. Her parents controlled their narrative through storytelling, and it was only in her late 40s that she realised their versions of her changed depending on the audience: which achievements were celebrated, which struggles were reframed. When she got her autism diagnosis, they explained it away as something else entirely. She internalised the idea that her authentic self wasn't acceptable for public consumption, only the edited version. She still has to actively work to distinguish the person she was told she was from the person she actually is.

Now amplify that tenfold with social media, where it's not occasional family gossip but a permanent digital record. I'm seeing it play out already: an influencer sharing every detail of her daughter's ADHD diagnosis, the school reactions, the classmates, nothing private. Lisa has had to block someone who posts every interaction, every meltdown, of their severely autistic son. It's often done with love, and parents genuinely believe they're celebrating their child. But intent doesn't erase impact. You can love someone and still violate their boundaries.

Lisa's suggestion is to ask yourself some uncomfortable questions before you post:

• Am I sharing this to celebrate my child, or to present myself as a good parent?
• Would I post this anyway if I got no likes?

If the answer to the second is no, it isn't about the child. It's about you.

The safest way to share photos with family online

So is the answer to never post anything? Lisa is realistic: everybody wants to share milestones with family. The safest way to share photos with family online is to be intentional about it, and the platform matters less than the practice.

End-to-end encrypted apps like WhatsApp are genuinely different from posting on Facebook or Instagram, because the company can't see your content. Sending a photo to your mum is a contained, intentional act. But send it to a family group of 15 people, and some of them might screenshot it or have insecure devices. Your risks multiply. So she's not saying don't share. She's saying have an informed risk: think about who might screenshot, whose devices aren't secure, and make every share conscious and minimal.

• Are you being intentional with what you're sharing?
• Are you considering your child's dignity, and the consent and ethics around it?
• Or are you just using a safer-feeling app to do the same thing you'd do on Instagram?

Where to draw the line with sharenting

I asked Lisa whether we'll see a backlash in the next 5, 10 or 15 years from children who grew up with their whole lives broadcast. She thinks it's already starting. Teenagers are asking parents to delete photos. Young adults are discovering their childhoods were monetised without their consent. She expects legal challenges around the right to privacy from birth, young people suing parents for emotional distress, and relationships between parents and adult children permanently damaged by the breach of trust.

We'll see it as one of the greatest ethical failures of our generation, because we were so focused on documenting every moment that we forgot children are people with rights to privacy and dignity as well.

Protecting your child's digital footprint isn't about perfection. It's about remembering that they're humans with their own agency, and lives they've yet to build. We don't need to force narratives onto them.

We ended on what social media was supposed to be. When Facebook first arrived, it promised connection: staying in touch, sharing our lives with the people we love. Lisa has real friendships because of it, including a dear friend she met in a dog group, who became a huge part of her and her husband's life before he passed away. Used as it was intended, it's a wonderful thing. But real connection, she said, doesn't need the broadcasting of your life to a gazillion people. It happens in direct messages, video calls and face-to-face moments.

Children deserve to have private lives. Not every single moment needs an audience. Some things can just be ours and be sacred and protected. Social media promised us community. What it gave us was an audience. And our children are paying the price for that today.

For practical guidance on children and online safety, visit Internet Matters.