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Are you sharing too much about your kids online? Probably

Fast Company – “To save Neverland, Peter Pan fought the pirates. To save their childhood, youth today need us, their parents, to fight against our “sharenting” habits. Our kids need us to protect their privacy and, along with it, their protected space to play so that they can make mischief, make mistakes, and grow up better for having made them. “Sharenting” is so omnipresent that most of us don’t even realize we’re doing it. Typically, this term refers to what parents post on social media. But “sharenting” is about so much more than social. It’s about doing all the things on all the digital platforms, from apps to smartphones to iPads to smartwatches to digital assistants and beyond. More formally: “Sharenting” encompasses all those ways that parents (as well as grandparents, teachers, and other trusted adults) transmit, store, and otherwise use children’s intimate data via digital technologies. As a law professor and part of the Youth & Media team at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, I’ve spent years studying the ways that parents’ use of digital tech impacts kids…And all of this sharenting is perfectly legal. The United States does not have any federal law that provides comprehensive protection for youth data privacy. Our legal system permits parents to share their kids’ private data, unless doing so would violate criminal law or another law of general applicability. Despite its name, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) doesn’t provide blanket protection for kids’ online privacy because it doesn’t apply when parents share personal information about their kids—only when kids under 13 share personal information about themselves…”

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