The first day of school. The birthday cake. The funny thing they said in the bath. For most parents, sharing these moments online feels like an extension of keeping a photo album — a way to mark time, stay connected with family, and remember. The term for this habit, coined over a decade ago, is “sharenting”: parents sharing details of their children’s lives on social media.
What’s changed isn’t the habit. It’s the environment those photos are shared into — and a growing body of research, regulation, and even regret from the people who did the sharing, suggests it’s worth a second look.
What Sharenting Means and Why It’s Getting More Attention Now
Sharenting covers everything from a single photo posted to a private group chat to a dedicated account documenting a child’s daily life for a public audience. The scale varies enormously, but the underlying action is the same: a parent makes a decision about a child’s digital footprint before that child is old enough to have any say in it.
By the time a child born today is old enough to have an opinion about their online presence, that presence may already include thousands of photos, videos, and posts — accumulated over years, by someone else, without their consent.
This isn’t a new observation, but it’s getting renewed attention for a few converging reasons: AI tools that can do more with a photo than ever before, growing public awareness of how permanent online content really is, and — notably — a wave of influencers and public figures who built their platforms partly around their children’s lives now publicly expressing regret about it.
The Permanence Problem
The most basic issue with sharenting is one that applies to all online sharing but lands differently when the subject is a child: once something is posted, the original poster loses meaningful control over it.
Even with privacy settings, even on platforms that allow deletion, content that’s been online — even briefly — can be screenshotted, saved, reshared, or scraped before it’s removed. A photo posted to a “private” account with 200 followers exists, from that point forward, as something that 200 people have had access to, any of whom could have saved it.
For an adult posting their own photo, this is a risk they’ve chosen for themselves. For a child, it’s a risk chosen on their behalf, with consequences that may not become apparent for years — when they’re applying for a job, starting a relationship, or simply Googling their own name and finding a decade of their childhood narrated by someone else.
Facial Recognition Doesn’t Care About Your Privacy Settings
The technology that processes photos has changed substantially in the last few years, and it changes what a posted photo of a child actually represents.
Modern facial recognition systems can identify individuals from photos with high accuracy — including children, whose faces these systems are increasingly trained to recognize as they age. A photo posted today doesn’t just exist as a single image; it can become a data point in a facial recognition system’s understanding of what that child looks like, at that age, in that context — and potentially how they look as they grow, if multiple photos across years are available.
This capability isn’t hypothetical or restricted to law enforcement or intelligence agencies. Commercial facial recognition tools, some explicitly marketed for “finding all photos of a person across the internet,” exist and are accessible. A child’s online photo history, accumulated through years of sharenting, is exactly the kind of dataset these tools are built to exploit.
Privacy settings on social platforms control who can see a post within that platform. They do nothing to prevent a photo from being processed by tools and systems entirely outside the platform, once it’s been viewed, saved, or scraped by anyone with access.
What Children Think About It Later
A growing body of research — including a 2026 study highlighted by the Canadian Parent network and ongoing coverage from outlets like the APA Monitor — has started to capture something that was previously mostly anecdotal: how children and teenagers feel, in retrospect, about their own childhoods being documented online by their parents.
The findings are not uniform, but a consistent theme emerges: many young people report discomfort, embarrassment, or a sense of having had something decided for them without input — even when the content itself was innocuous or affectionate. The issue often isn’t that any specific photo was harmful. It’s the cumulative effect of having a publicly documented childhood that they didn’t choose and, in many cases, weren’t aware of until they were old enough to look.
Separately, a 2026 case that drew significant media attention involved an influencer who had built a following partly around content featuring their children, publicly expressing regret and reconsidering the practice — sparking a broader debate about where the line should be for parents whose audience-building overlaps with their children’s lives.
The Legal Landscape Is Starting to Catch Up
Regulators and lawmakers have been slower than the platforms and the technology, but movement is happening. Several jurisdictions have begun considering or implementing protections specifically aimed at children’s digital footprints — including, in some places, giving children a future legal pathway to request the removal of content their parents posted about them as minors, once they reach adulthood.
This kind of “right to be forgotten for sharenting” is still emerging and inconsistent across jurisdictions, but its existence as a topic of serious legislative discussion signals something: the gap between “what parents have been doing for over a decade” and “what’s considered appropriate for a child’s digital privacy” is wide enough that lawmakers are starting to address it directly.
Sharing vs. Storing: A Distinction Worth Making
None of this means parents should stop taking photos of their kids, or that documenting childhood is itself the problem. The useful distinction is between sharing — making a photo accessible to an audience, however small, on a platform you don’t control — and storing — keeping a photo somewhere private, organized, and accessible to the people who matter, without it being “posted” anywhere at all.
Most of the value that sharenting provides — preserving memories, staying connected with family, having a record to look back on — doesn’t actually require posting. A private album shared directly with grandparents achieves the “staying connected” goal without putting a child’s photo into a facial-recognition-trainable, screenshot-able, permanently public space.
The habit of “take a cute photo → post it” is largely a habit of convenience — posting is often the fastest way to share a photo with specific people, because the platforms are built to make posting effortless and private sharing comparatively clunky. That’s a design choice by the platforms, not a necessity.
A Practical Framework for Family Photos
A few principles that don’t require giving up documentation of your kids’ lives, just changing where it lives:
Default to private storage, not public posting. Take the photos you’ve always taken. Store them somewhere private by default. Decide deliberately, case by case, whether something is worth posting publicly — rather than posting being the default action and privacy being the exception you’d have to actively choose.
Share directly with people, not platforms. Sending a photo to grandparents via a private album or message achieves the connection goal without adding the photo to a public or semi-public dataset.
Consider your child’s future perspective, not just your current one. A photo that feels charming to post today is one your child will encounter, as a fixed part of their online history, at every age from now on. The research on how kids feel about this later is worth weighing against the immediate appeal of sharing now.
Remember that “delete” doesn’t undo “posted.” Once something has been visible, even briefly, the permanence problem applies. The most reliable privacy decision is the one made before posting, not after.
Where daftei Fits
daftei is built for exactly the kind of photo and memory storage that sharenting habits often skip past in favor of posting: private, organized, and accessible to you (and the people you choose) without ever becoming part of a public platform’s dataset.
Photos and videos stored in daftei are encrypted in transit with TLS 1.3 and at rest with AES-256. daftei doesn’t run advertising, doesn’t sell user data, and doesn’t train AI models — including facial recognition or any other model — on the photos you store. A family’s entire photo history can live there, organized and retrievable, without ever having been posted anywhere at all.
The 5 GB free tier covers a meaningful amount of photos and memories to start with; Pro removes the limit for $5.99/month or $44.99/year (₹249/month or ₹1,799/year in India).
Documenting your children’s lives and protecting their future privacy aren’t in tension — they only feel that way because the platforms most people default to for “sharing memories” are built around posting publicly. Keeping the memories and skipping the post is not a compromise. It’s often closer to what most parents actually wanted in the first place.