Children in content: consent, dignity and the digital footprint

Children have appeared in family photos and home movies for as long as cameras have existed. What has changed is scale, permanence and money. A family album is seen by relatives; a family channel is seen by strangers worldwide, archived indefinitely and often earns income. This lesson looks at why children are a special case, what consent means for a child, how to protect a child's dignity, and how to think about the long-term digital footprint that content creates. CRE-420 lesson 10 introduced child creator laws and CRE-350 discussed wellbeing; this lesson goes deeper into the ethics that sit underneath those rules.

Why children are different

Children are not small adults. Three features make content involving them ethically different from content involving consenting adults.

• Limited capacity to consent. Young children cannot understand what it means for a video to be public, permanent and monetized. Even teenagers may not foresee how they will feel about content as adults.
• Dependence on parents. Children usually cannot say no to a parent who controls their home, money and daily life. When the parent is also the creator, there is a built-in conflict of interest.
• A long future. Content posted when a child is five may still be searchable when they apply for university, look for work or start relationships. The child bears the consequences for decades; the parent made the decision.

International law recognizes these differences. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Canada and almost every other country have ratified, protects children's privacy in Article 16 and requires that the best interests of the child be a primary consideration in actions affecting them in Article 3. The US has signed but not ratified the Convention, but its principles are widely used in ethics and policy discussions in both countries. In 2021 the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child adopted General Comment No. 25, which applies these rights to the digital environment and specifically mentions risks from commercial use of children's images.

Sharenting

The word sharenting describes parents sharing information, photos and videos of their children online. Most sharenting is ordinary and harmless: a first-day-of-school photo shared with family. It becomes a concern when it is public, frequent, monetized, intimate or revealing. Researchers have estimated that many children have a substantial online presence created by their parents before they are old enough to have social media accounts of their own. Concerns include embarrassment, loss of control over one's own story, identity theft from details such as full names and birthdays, and, in the worst cases, images being taken and misused by people with harmful intentions.

A useful distinction is between sharing about your own experience as a parent and sharing your child's experience. A parent talking about the challenges of sleep deprivation is telling their own story. A video of a child's medical procedure, toilet training or emotional meltdown is telling the child's story, and the child has a strong interest in how, and whether, it is told.

Consent and assent

Ethics distinguishes between consent and assent. Consent is a legally and ethically valid agreement from someone with capacity to understand. Assent is a child's own agreement, given at a level appropriate to their age, even though their parent provides the formal consent. Good practice seeks both: parental consent and the child's genuine assent, with the child's no respected.

These ages are approximate; children develop at different rates. The principle, sometimes called the child's evolving capacity, is that a child's say should grow as their understanding grows. A practical habit is to ask a school-age child before filming and again before posting, and to treat any sign of reluctance as a no.

Dignity: what not to post

Some categories of content carry a high risk of lasting harm and are best avoided altogether, regardless of how popular they might be. Platforms also restrict many of them, and lesson 4 covers platform rules.

• Nudity or partial nudity of any kind, including bath time, swimming, changing and toilet training. Even innocent images can be taken and misused, and many platforms remove them.
• Distress, punishment and humiliation, such as tantrums, crying, pranks that frighten a child or videos about discipline.
• Medical and mental health details, including diagnoses, procedures, therapy and behavioural difficulties, which belong to the child's private health information.
• Intimate milestones, such as puberty, first periods or first crushes.
• Identifying information, such as full names, school names, routines and home details, covered in lesson 5.

The ten-year test from lesson 1 captures most of this. A good additional question is whether you would post the same content if it showed an adult relative instead of your child. If an adult would object, a child is likely to object later too.

Children as workers

When a child appears regularly in monetized content, they are doing work, even if the family does not call it that. Filming can take hours, require repeated takes and interfere with play, school and rest. Child performer laws in the traditional entertainment industry limit working hours and require breaks and schooling for exactly this reason. Lesson 3 covers how those rules apply, or fail to apply, to family content, but responsible creators set their own limits regardless.

The right to be forgotten, for children

A growing number of laws and policies give people some ability to remove content created about them as children. Minnesota's law, for example, lets a minor ask for content featuring them to be deleted after they turn 13, and Quebec's privacy law gives people a right to request de-indexing in some circumstances. Platforms also have processes for removing content posted by others. Even where no law requires it, a responsible family creator commits in advance to removing content when a child asks, and plans for the child to review their own archive as they grow up.

In practice, removal from the creator's channel does not remove copies others have downloaded or reposted. This is why prevention, not posting identifying or intimate content in the first place, matters far more than later removal.

Positive alternatives

Responsible family content is still possible and popular. Creators use approaches such as these:

• Focusing on the parent's own experience, skills and opinions rather than filming the child.
• Showing children without faces, from behind, or only hands and voices, with no names.
• Using nicknames and avoiding identifying details.
• Featuring children only in positive, ordinary activities they are proud of, with their agreement.
• Letting older children co-create, with control over their own appearances and a share of income.

When a child says no later

Children who agreed to appear when they were younger sometimes change their minds as teenagers, and some former child stars of family channels have described the distress of finding that videos of their childhood could not be taken back. A responsible family creator plans for this from the start. Keep a simple record of which videos feature each child, so that removal is quick if asked. Talk with children about their online presence at natural moments, such as starting a new school, and treat their wishes about the archive as seriously as their wishes about new content. Some families agree that, when each child turns a certain age, the child reviews the archive and decides what stays public. These conversations can be uncomfortable for parents whose income depends on the content, which is exactly why committing to them in advance matters.