But I am not alone. One of the women behind Big Little Feelings, an Instagram account offering toddler-management advice with 2.8 million followers, recently deleted all the photos she had posted of her daughters. “My children didn’t ask to be where we are today,” Kristin Gallant said in a post announcing her decision.
The debate over “sharenthood” — as law professor Leah Plunkett dubbed the trend of parents sharing their kids’ data online — has raged for some time. Everyday decisions made by parents and guardians “play an under-appreciated yet outsized role in determining youths’ digital dossier, as well as their life prospects”, argued Plunkett in a 2019 book.
Since then, tech advances have introduced new complications for parents and guardians. Facial recognition technology is getting better all the time. Using artificial intelligence, Google Photos is able to recognise some of my family members as toddlers and as twentysomethings. If that is already widely available today, what might be possible by the time my daughter is a teenager?
The latest trend in AI is image-generation tools such as Dall-E 2, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. Type a “prompt” into a text box, and the AI produces an image of what’s described. The data for these generative-AI systems are often scraped from the open internet.
Sure, the odds are remote that Instagram posts of my daughter would go through this AI production line until her likeness emerges in someone’s generative art. But once images are out there on the web, it can be hard to remove them completely.
I do send photos digitally to friends and family via secure, private messaging apps such as WhatsApp and iMessage, or on Apple’s iCloud Photos, where data are also encrypted. But these closed networks are very different to posting on the open internet.
Unfortunately, politicians in some countries, including the UK with its online safety bill, want to undermine encryption. They say private messaging apps can be used by child abusers to escape justice. This is hard to argue against but removing one of the last safe spaces we have to share images of our children could create a whole new set of problems, years from now, that we cannot even imagine today.
- Tim Bradshaw is the FT’s global technology correspondent
Written by: Tim Bradshaw
© Financial Times