A recent piece of news has taken us by surprise. The French National Gendarmerie has warned that parents could face jail or hefty fines if they post their children’s photographs on Facebook.
According to French privacy law, parents who post their children’s photos on Facebook without consent could be jailed or fined, or even be sued by their children when they grow up if their offspring feel their parents infringed on their right to privacy.
In China, the privacy right is prescribed in Article 2 of the Tort Law as a separate civil right. Anyone who infringes on another person’s privacy rights is subject to legal liability, including a parent violating his/her children’s rights.
Legally speaking, minors because of their age are unable to give consent for many things, and their rights are generally entrusted to their parents or custodians.
So let’s do a SWOT analysis to have a better understanding of the issue.
所以,為了能更好地理解這個問題,我們有必要進行一次SWOT分析
Strengths: One, it helps create and maintain the emotional bonds with friends and relatives. Two, it helps parents keep record of every important stage of their children’s development.
Weaknesses: First is the potential identity leak and the subsequent security risk. Pedophiles or criminals can put together information on a child according to its parents’ online postings. Second, the children’s photos could be saved and misused by child-porn websites. Third, some photos could become a source of embarrassment to the children when they grow up. Fourth, it could prove very costly to the kids in the future. Thanks to the development of big data, many employers now investigate candidates’ background on the internet.
Opportunities: SNS operators provide grouping tools and privacy-setting tools that can help parents group online contacts to tweet information precisely to those who they are familiar with. And certain SNS operators have started taking precautionary measures such as using pop-up notices to warn a person posting his/her children’s photos.
Threats: Since the privacy law in China is not clear on whether parents can directly post their children’s photos or videos online without consent, and since there are no clear penal provisions, it is not easy to use legal means to curb "sharenting".