I feel sorry for kids these days, thinking about how videos and pictures (and plenty of embarassing ones at that) are plastered all over social media by their parents with them having no ability to ever exercise any control on limiting the sharing of the videos and pictures once they are older and potentially bothered/annoyed about it all.

That being said, it's hard to really regulate this. When someone has a baby, they usually share a photo in a public manner of the entire family. It's hard to argue that parents shouldn't be able to share any pictures of their family in a public manner. It also would then prevent journalists or anyone for that matter, from taking pictures in public spaces that contained any minors... which starts to get absurd.

Hopefully my kids will appreciate that we never posted pictures of them publicly on social media (only shared privately within immediate family). At the very least, it's one less thing they'll have to worry about as they grow up.

Ironically the first time I’ve seen this point made is in an Onion video - 6-Year-Old Explains How Messed Up It Is That Her Entire Life Has Been Put On Facebook https://www.theonion.com/6-year-old-explains-how-messed-up-i...

>Hopefully my kids will appreciate that we never posted pictures of them publicly on social media (only shared privately within immediate family). At the very least, it's one less thing they'll have to worry about as they grow up.

The trick is to live like it's 1980. We have many, many pictures of our child, but only 10-15 on social media (of things like winning sporting events or the like). Everything else is in digital form on drives in our home server or printed in physical frames. If/when the child decides they want to do something with their photos, there they are.

Also handy to have on the home server because we can turn any screen into a digital frame on our network. That will be great when they bring their first boy/girlfriend home.

People just feel the impulsive need to share literally everything on social media. Everything is a competition for likes and attention. It's disgusting.

Yup. We still print out an annual photobook that we spend time making with all our favorite pics/memories from the year and the kids love going through the picture books every so often. There is something very different in the way they experience a physical picture book vs. viewing the images on a tablet/computer.

As a parent you should be able to share to a private FB, a private IG, a private YT account. That's fine, because you presumably have control over who sees those photos (hopefully people you actually know).

I'm also not talking about someone sharing a photo publicly with someone else's kid in the background.

I just mean as a parent you should need consent to share a video of your kids to a public social media channel. If your kid cannot give consent because they are underage or refuses, then you shouldn't be able to share it.

> As a parent you should be able to share to a private FB, a private IG, a private YT account. That's fine, because you presumably have control over who sees those photos (hopefully people you actually know).

I'm afraid not a lot of parents/people would be willing to pay for such service, so I'm unsure this is going to happen any time soon.

Many of these videos are uploaded by the kid themselves, no? Above 13, you're allowed to have your own account and upload videos. Even if the parent uploaded videos are removed, it still doesn't fully solve the problem.

Many governments have made clear that children are unable to consent on their own to many things (the "Age of Consent" itself comes to mind), and before the age at which they are able to consent, their parents act as a steward of their consent. It does bring up an interesting line of thought though, which is that if we legislated that children (once adults) can consent to the release of their likeness/recordings of themselves, and they DO consent to sexually suggestive content as described in this post, can they also not consent to release fully nude/sexual content of themselves from when they were younger? Where along that line do they lose the ability to make informed consent decisions? I would also note that children also do not seem to have an expected right to privacy from their own parents, per cultural norms.

We have not reached consensus on the subject of whether bad images of children are bad because the child cannot have consented to the production/spreading of the image, or simply bad inherently in and of themselves - even within most jurisdictions, never mind across them; however, consensus is currently swaying towards the latter - more and more jurisdictions are leaning towards outlawing e.g. drawings of imaginary children.

In practice no politician will want to be on record as the cause of child safety ratchets being relaxed; and so there is no realistic path from the current environment to one in which a person may become free to act as they see fit with previously problematic images of themselves on reaching majority - the trend is towards such images being seen as problematic purely based on content, regardless of context.

Wouldn't that also ban child actors? Also, a lot of famous Youtubers like Mark Rober show their kids or newphews playing around with their latest experiment. Most people would consider banning these videos reactionary.

I think you could apply for exceptions like you would for child actors (e.g. whatever law allows them to get around child labor laws)

Point is there should be a way to limit public sharing of photos and videos without a child's consent. There should be a good reason, beyond a parent's own narcissism.

> I think you could apply for exceptions like you would for child actors (e.g. whatever law allows them to get around child labor laws)

There is an application in CA for an entertainment work permit, but that's mostly validating age and satisfactory education status (for school age children) and medical clearance (for infants under 1). So, I think the analogy doesn't work and you should work out what kind of application you mean here.

As disturbing as I find this situation, I think that it is a bad idea to force companies to block photos and videos of children to be uploaded.