How often do you post photos of your child online?
Have you posted images of your nieces or nephews blowing out candles at a birthday party?
Or, perhaps you’ve shared a picture of your friend’s toddler playing on the beach?
We live in a world where sharing images of our lives, and in turn the lives of our children, has become completely normalised.
Two Israeli embassy staff shot dead near Jewish museum in Washington DC
Gardaí recover chainsaw and more body parts from farmyard of Michael Gaine
Uisce Éireann warns of ‘critical’ need for regulatory reforms to enable housing targets
Russia funnelled money to Kremlin supporter in Ukraine via Ireland to bypass sanctions, records show
But, where do those images actually end up? And even if we engage the privacy settings on our social media accounts, are these photos actually kept under lock and key?
In 2023, an ad by a German telecoms company went viral after it created a deepfake using just one image of a 9-year-old girl. While this is an extreme example of the misuse of someone’s image, experts are warning that sharing photos of children can have serious long-term consequences.
Leah Plunkett, author of ‘Sharenthood’ and faculty at Harvard law school, joins the In The News podcast to discuss the implications of sharing images of children online and the ethics of breaching young people’s privacy.
Today, on In The News, what are the risks of sharing our kids’ lives on social media?
Presented by Sorcha Pollak. Produced by Aideen Finnegan.
