Last week the deputies of the French National Assembly they approved unanimously a draft law to ensure that boys and girls respect the right to their image, especially online. Bruno Studer, one of the deputies of Renaissance, the party of President Emmanuel Macron, who presented the bill, explained: «The message for parents is that their task is also to protect the privacy of their children. In an increasingly digitized society, respect for the privacy of minors is now essential for their safety, well-being and development”.
The phenomenon of constant exposure of boys and girls on social media by their parents, or other adults who are responsible for it, is called «sharenting» (from the union of the English words «share», share, and «parenting», being parents). For several years it has been the specific object of analysis and reflections which distinguish it from practices already historically widespread on other media, such as television or cinema, and whose dynamics are more or less known. Instead, it is associated with new implications, risks and effects that are still partly unknown, relating both to privacy and rights and to that of the individual psychological development of children.
In the French bill it is said that because of the sharenting boys and girls find themselves “stripped of their private life”. And several studies on the subject are cited. In 2018 the Children’s Commissioner for England, the ombudsman for children and young people in the United Kingdom, he wrote for example that “on average, minors appear in 1,300 photographs published online before the age of 13 on their own accounts, or on those of parents and relatives”.
A more recent report by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, linked to the US Congress, he claims that the risks induced by the online exposure of images of minors materialize above all in the difficulty of controlling the dissemination of those same images: “50 percent of the photographs circulating on child pornography forums were initially published by parents on their social networks” .
In 2021 an investigation by the US telecommunications company Verizon into the lack of security to which personal data collected online is exposed showed that the phenomenon of sharenting is closely connected to that of identity theft. And by 2030, dice BBCnearly two-thirds of identity theft cases involve minors.
– Read also: What life will the children of influencers have?
Il bill approved by the French National Assembly plans to introduce “the notion of private life in the definition of parental responsibility” or to impose a delegation of parental responsibility on this issue “in situations where the interests of the parents conflict with the interests of the child to the exercise of the right to his image”. If it were definitively approved, the protection of the privacy of their children would therefore also be included among the legal obligations of parents or guardians, with the possibility of involving the minor in sharing this responsibility “according to his age and degree of maturity”.
In the event of disagreement, a judge may prohibit one parent from posting or sharing photos of the child without the other’s permission. And in the most extreme cases, parents may also lose parental responsibility for their children’s image rights: when “the dissemination of the child’s image seriously harms the dignity or moral integrity of the child itself”.
To become law, the proposal must also be approved by the Senate. The discussion is scheduled for next week.
During the electoral campaign for his reappointment, French President Emmanuel Macron had promised to make the protection of boys and girls a priority in his second term. In November he had announced an initiative with the aim of improving the online safety of minors and a few weeks ago the government presented a proposal to prevent minors from accessing porn sites through a “reliable” mechanism of certification of majority age.
– Read also: France wants to block minors from accessing porn sites