The average child now has a digital footprint before they can walk: scans, birth announcements, a thousand photographs shared by loving adults. By the time they are old enough to hold a phone, platforms may hold thousands of data points about them — assembled without a single act of consent by the person they describe. Legislators, covered by outlets such as the BBC, have begun to respond.
The new wave of law has two fronts. One regulates the platforms: age assurance, safer defaults, bans on profiling children for advertising. The other, more delicate front reaches the family itself — the “sharenting” question of what parents may publish about a child who will one day be an adult with opinions about it.
The Platform Rules Tighten
Age-appropriate design codes now require services likely to reach children to default to privacy: no behavioural advertising, no geolocation by default, no nudging design aimed at keeping minors scrolling. Several jurisdictions have added age-verification duties for adult content and outright social-media age floors, with enforcement actions beginning.
The technical debate is fierce. Age assurance must verify adulthood or childhood without building identity databases that themselves become privacy hazards. The industry’s answer — estimation from behaviour or face, third-party attestations that reveal nothing but the age band — is improving under regulatory pressure, which is rather the point of it.
Sharenting and the Child’s Own Rights
The family front is newer law. Some countries now recognise children’s image rights against their own parents’ posting, require both parents’ consent for monetised content, and let adults demand deletion of childhood material posted about them. Child influencers — the earners of family channels — are gaining the labour protections that child actors won a century ago, including escrowed earnings.
Most parental sharing is, of course, love in digital form, and the law treads gently there. The emerging norm is proportionality: private groups rather than public posts, faces rather than locations and routines, and a growing instinct to ask the child — who will, after all, inherit the archive.
Schools, Apps and the Data Middle
Between platforms and parents sits a third collector: education technology. Learning apps, behaviour trackers and school communication systems process children’s data at scale, procured by institutions with little bargaining power or privacy expertise. Audits in several countries have found trackers and terms no parent would have signed knowingly.
Procurement is becoming the remedy: privacy certification for classroom software, contractual bans on advertising use, and data minimisation by default. The principle gaining ground is that a child’s school day should not be a data harvest — however personalised the learning it funds.
Paediatric and psychology bodies have entered the debate with guidance of their own: delaying public posting, auditing the audience of family accounts, and treating a child’s refusal as binding from a surprisingly young age. The advice reads less like restriction than like respect, formalised.
Growing Up With an Audience
The first researched generation offers the design brief. Young adults who grew up posted-about are not uniformly resentful — many are sanguine about family albums — but they distinguish sharply between being shared with love and being performed for engagement. The audience, they say, was the violation, not the camera.
That distinction may be the era’s gift to its children: a culture that treats a child’s image as borrowed, not owned. The laws are scaffolding; the norm — ask, minimise, and remember the future adult — is the building.
The Wider Picture
There is a generational handover embedded in these stories. Norms that one cohort built its life around are being renegotiated by the next, in public, with data. The renegotiations are noisy because the stakes are real — time, identity, security — but the direction of travel, toward the measurable and the humane, is hard to miss.
Childhood was once the private season of life, remembered imperfectly and owned by the person who lived it. The internet made it publishable. The task now — for platforms, parents and parliaments alike — is to give children back the authorship of their own beginnings.
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