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A month after her son was born, Samantha Taylor, 30, and her husband came to a realization: They didn’t want photos of their child posted online. They worried about how quickly artificial intelligence was advancing and how the photos could be used in addition to “creeps online in general. It was such a strong mom instinct,” Taylor said. “It was like something took over. I just felt so protective.” Taylor left her son’s birth announcement on social media, but now, a year later, that is the only photo of the child that exists online.

Taylor is among the legion of parents who has decided that “sharenting” is out and privacy is in. For years, some parents have chosen to keep their kids offline or highly curate how they appear, pasting emojis over their faces or limiting pictures of their children to their “<a href="https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/14/instagram-brings-close-friends-feature-to-the-main-feed/" target=_blank>close friends</a>” community on Instagram. Now, the online landscape is even darker: The rise of  AI has created new anxieties around how an innocent photo could be manipulated into a deepfake or contribute to identity fraud, and children have been targeted in <a href="https://washingtonpost.com/parenting/2023/10/02/teen-boys-sextortion/" target=_blank>horrifying extortion schemes</a> through social media. Parents are increasingly rethinking what it means to create an online footprint their child can’t actively consent to.

To ensure everyone was on the same page, Taylor sent a text requesting their families abide by their wishes. Her family easily obliged; her husband’s family was a different story. “They were not understanding at all,” Taylor said. “They definitely fought us about it and said that we were overreacting. They thought I was crazy.” One family member even questioned whether the decision was reflective of possible postpartum anxiety. Taylor pushed back, explaining that she wasn’t comfortable broadcasting her son’s face to people she didn’t know. Family members searched for loopholes: What if the photo was from far away? What if it was a group photo? “I just said none at all because I didn’t want any gray areas,” she said. And aside from photos reaching people she doesn’t know, Taylor made the decision with her son’s future feelings in mind. “I don’t want our son to grow up and say, ‘well why did you post that without me saying it was okay?’”

TikTok creator Alex Kutcher, 31, also considered how her child would feel about being posted in the future. Kutcher has nearly <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@mrskutcher?lang=en" target=_blank>200,000 followers on TikTok</a> where she posts about first-time parenthood, but she only shows her daughter’s face covered by star emojis or a Julia Roberts GIF. Full photos are only shown to her close friends list on Instagram. Kutcher sees the decision as an extension of her parenting philosophy. “It really is about keeping her private and allowing her to choose,” she said. “It’s the same thing when people say, I’m not going to force my kids to hug or kiss relatives just because they’re related to them. It’s kind of along that same principle.” Plus, Kutcher said, things are just more peaceful this way. She’s noticed she’s become less of a target for unsolicited parenting advice since keeping her daughter offline. “It’s been very peaceful,” she said. “I didn’t want so many people that I didn’t know to be involved in such a private part of my life. That should be reserved for people that I see consistently.”

Priya Kumar, an assistant professor at Pennsylvania State University who studies children’s privacy in relation to digital technologies, connects this trend to larger societal concerns about these online platforms. “Collectively, we have been really grappling with a lot of implications of the fact that not just our communication, but our interactions and culture and democracy is operating through these giant corporate platforms that are owned by a small number of people,” Kumar said. “And I think that has really brought these questions around: What can we as individuals do to protect our privacy in the face of this?” The idea of an individual decision despite these societal issues can be tempting, Kumar says, and that’s where parental choice comes in. You can announce your pregnancy or keep it offline. You can put your kid on social media or keep them off. You can post them only from the back or only with an emoji covering their face.

AI advances have only deepened parents’ concerns. Ben Colman, CEO of AI- detection company Reality Defender, says the existence of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/09/20/deepfakes-what-are-fake-ai-video-dangers-and-how-to-spot-them/6512c87c-57e2-11ee-bf64-cd88fe7adc71_story.html" target=_blank>deepfakes</a> has made parents “increasingly wary.” AI technology has made creating doctored photos very accessible — and as easy as putting a couple of keywords into something  such as ChatGPT. “Parents are concerned about their children’s faces being placed in fabricated and generated works, with particular worries of having them depicted without consent in compromising manners,” Colman says. “Parents were slow to realize that the internet never forgets. Yet with high-profile privacy scandals and newfound fears with generative AI, they came to realize that by posting images of your child to the internet, you’re denying them a say as to whether or not you want images of them … to forever exist in the digital sphere.”

Jillian Schmitz, 42, is pregnant with her first child and has already decided she won’t be showing their face online — she’s just not sure if she’ll choose to post them from the back or with emojis covering their face. When her baby shower invitations were sent out, a note was included asking partygoers not to post on social media (“Privacy requested,” the note read. “Please do not post on social media.<i>”)</i>. “Everybody respected that,” Schmitz said. “I don’t know how they felt about it, but they respected it.” As the end of her pregnancy draws near, Schmitz wonders: Will she have to reiterate her wishes to keep her child offline? Will family members abide by her choice? And if they don’t, what will that conflict look like? Despite the unknowns, she’s confident in her decision, which was solidified when she read the New York Times exposé on <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/22/us/instagram-child-influencers.html" target=_blank>accounts of children that have a large number of adult male followers</a>.

Ashley Koch, 36, used to share images and stories of her son on Instagram and Facebook, but when he was around the age of 5, a stranger made a lewd comment on one of her posts that made her rethink her son’s online footprint. “I started questioning, ‘should I be putting him on [the internet] so much?’ Random strangers having the ability to comment on cute little pictures of him made me uncomfortable.”

Koch also thinks back to her own childhood. She remembers how embarrassing she found it when her parents told their friends stories about her or shared things she viewed as private. “If you magnify that on the scale of social media, I can’t imagine,” she said. “If a kid Googled themselves and saw all this stuff about them out there, that would be really overwhelming. It’s just so much information. And as a kid, you only have so much control over your life anyway.” In choosing to keep her son offline, Koch hopes she’s extending him a bit more control.

Fortesa Latifi is a journalist based in Los Angeles, California.

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As the internet gets scarier, more parents keep their kids’ photos offline

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