"Sharenting"

Sharenting - parents sharing kids' information... should we care? Should they care? In this episode, we connect with Drs. Mariea Hoy  and Alexa K. Fox on their recent publication, “Smart Devices, Smart Decisions? Implications of Parents’ Sharenting for Children’s Online Privacy,” in Journal of Public Policy & Marketing. This research explored how parents, specifically mothers, post about their children on social media and how they share their children’s personally identifiable information (PII) in a marketing context. 

@alexaKaye3 @UAkronMarketing #UAkronMarketing @akronCBA #UACBA
@Dr.Hoy480 @UTADPR @UTCCI @UTKnoxville

#privacy #socialmedia #PII #parenting

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From Season 6, our episodes are edited by Fey O'Brien. Our intro and exit music is Channel Intro 24 by Sascha Ende, licensed under CC BY 4.0. with the voiceover by Tim Foley.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello and welcome to Serious Privacy. We are very happy to see that you are back again or to hear that you are back again. My name is Paul Breitbart.

SPEAKER_03 0:09

And I am Kay Royal, and this is our podcast.

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Okay, joining us today are two scientists who wrote a very interesting paper that we will be discussing today about sharenting. And yes, you hear it correctly, sharenting. You will learn all about it during this podcast. But joining us today are Dr. Alexa Fox, who is Assistant Professor of Marketing at the University of Akron, and Professor Maria Hoy, Professor of Advertising at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, Tennessee. Welcome to both of you.

SPEAKER_02 0:42

Thank you for having us. Thank you. We're glad to be here.

SPEAKER_00 0:45

Maybe each of you can just provide a little bit of background on who you are. I mean, I've given the official titles, but tell us a bit more about your life, your work, how did you come up with this topic?

SPEAKER_02 0:58

Sure. My name is Alexa Fox. I'm an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Akron, and I'm actually an alumna of the university as well. So for me to be able to teach at the University of Akron, where I was a student once, it's a really wonderful privilege. And I also have some ties to Tennessee. I did my PhD at the University of Memphis. And so I'm excited to be getting into this space. I really started as a doctoral student looking into online privacy. And Maria and I met at a conference that we're now proud to represent our work at. And we've done that for several years in this charenting space as well as other projects that we've both worked on. We were both passionate about the American Marketing Association Marketing and Public Policy Conference. And so that's where we met, and we both realized we had a passion for online privacy and just some conversations that started happening probably about five years ago now, where we were both looking at how we could combine our interests, and we both had some interest in looking at children's privacy. And so, really, that's where for me this paper has been a big opportunity for me to take off my current my research career in this particular space. I do research in digital marketing and social media marketing more broadly, kind of how consumers and companies use this technology. But this is really exciting for me to be able to specifically focus on online privacy, especially kids' privacy, a topic that both Maria and I are passionate about.

SPEAKER_01 2:23

I'm Maria Hoy. I, as you said, I'm a professor of advertising at the University of Tennessee. I have been there for 30 years. I'm now my 31st year. I was just a child, clearly, when I started teaching there. I teach the advertising and society classes, advertising issues, and in the advertising campaigns class, which allow me to bring my research interest into the classroom. I have been working in the areas of online privacy since the late 90s, got in very early working with a doctoral student, and she has gone on also to work in the area Kimishan. But we did some work there. We began looking, um, another colleague of mine in the late 2000s were looking at Facebook Beacon and how college students were responding to the idea of Facebook collecting data about them. And so I've been working in this area. My other areas of research are looking at disclosures, those that fine print that you probably can't read when you are scrolling through your feed, as well as some direct-to-consumer drug advertising specifically for those risks disclosures. So again, as Alexa said, when she approached me saying that she was uh looking to work with a senior faculty member and would I work with her in this area, I was flattered that she was interested. And so when we began talking about this, we looked at a variety of areas for children's and privacy, but it really settled down, and Alexa was very, very interested in what parents were posting about their children. She has a lot of contemporaries who have children in this young age range, and I hadn't really been paying attention to it, honestly, in my feeds. I didn't have a lot of parents I was following in my Twitter or my Instagram. And so when she started pointing it out and I started seeing it, it was like, wow, there's a lot of people posting a lot of personal information about their children. And then I think where it really caught us as marketing professionals, marketing researchers, is I don't know if you're familiar with Krispy Kreme Donuts. I know Kay probably is. Krispy Kreme Donuts? Yes. Yes. Well, I happen to follow Krispy Kreme Donuts, and as people were taking pictures of their kids and them going to Krispy Kreme, getting their free donut, and here's us, you know, with the funny hats on, and here we are having family time. They were tagging Krispy Kream, and then Krispy Kreme was retweeting that picture. And my thought was, huh. I wonder, first of all, how many parents are tagging a brand? Because it's one thing to say, I'm gonna post a you know, cute picture of my kid. I'm seeing a lot of that come through this week as parents are now home with their children, they're working full-time, and you know, there's a lot of jokes about my kids are driving me crazy. What are you doing to homeschool? So there's a lot of sharenting going on or posting about your children online. But what we were really focusing on was parents tagging brands in it, and then later on, well, okay, you can't really help that if you're a brand. But then we started to see brands, and Carter's was the example, Carter's children's apparel, of requesting or setting up a venue to encourage parents, specifically moms, to share about their children. And so all of our training was the red flags were going up that, oh my gosh, here's a lot of children's personal information that is now being posted by the parents online and in some cases at the behest of the brands themselves. And so that's our corner that we're working in in the Sherating Research.

SPEAKER_03 5:43

Oh, that is fascinating. I'm writing notes down to make sure I get back to that because one of the things that we do on our podcast is we ask an unexpected question of the guest at first during the introductions. And uh I we we let y'all introduce first, but I have to come back with the unexpected personal questions. Okay. What is the one accessory you have to make sure that you have anytime you leave the house? Lipstick. Lipstick. Nice. Yep.

SPEAKER_02 6:15

I would say earrings, actually. I really I love to have earrings in, and when I don't, I feel like I'm not complete. Nice, Paul.

SPEAKER_03 6:26

I'm gonna come to you. What's your one accessory?

SPEAKER_00 6:28

I have one family heirloom ring, and that is one that I always wear.

SPEAKER_03 6:32

That is awesome. Mine is always rings, as your earrings, mine's rings. I think I'm getting to the point it needs to be lipstick.

SPEAKER_01 6:41

I will say we cannot count my wedding ring because my wedding ring is always on. So it's not really an accessory, it's part of my identity. But exactly. But the lipstick is like, you know, if I ever get coronavirus and I don't put on lipstick, you know I'm not long for this world.

SPEAKER_03 6:58

That is the symptom to watch.

SPEAKER_01 7:00

That is, that is. Maria doesn't have on lipstick, you know.

SPEAKER_03 7:04

I love it. Okay, Paul, back over to you. I wrote down to follow up on user-generated content, but I know that you have some wonderful questions to ask the guests that you've pre-planned.

SPEAKER_00 7:14

Yes, well, let's let's start with uh with sharenting itself, because it might be a term that not everybody is already familiar with. If I haven't seen it a lot in the papers yet, well, in your paper, obviously, but not in the the regular newspapers. And in in the paper that you've written, you give a near legal definition of sharenting, the habitual use of social media to share news and images of one's children. But for the non-lawyers who are listening to this, what what exactly do you understand? Should we understand when you talk about sharenting?

SPEAKER_02 7:48

Well, I think sharenting is really this idea of people have been sharing photos, information about their children for years, just not on the internet. You know, there's opportunities to share, even just looking at information with a family member, you know, having a photo album and sharing a photo album for years. This has been a practice that we've done, or maybe you would share information about, you know, how a child's doing in a certain area, maybe even share some information about what's going on at school, grades, something along these lines. But the idea of sharenting has really kind of come about where this practice has now been enabled by the internet to be available to a broader audience. And sometimes we're not necessarily just having a one-on-one conversation. We might be sharing that information with lots of people all at once. And sometimes those people who are receiving that information, we may not necessarily even realize exactly who they are. It might be an unintended audience, so to speak. So I think this idea of parents sharing information about their children, and that information can range in a variety of formats from personally identifiable information. We'll talk about that a little bit more, I think, as we as we kind of progress and unpack the article. But it could be photos, it could be name, it could be a birthday, it could be all any kind of information that the parents are sharing on behalf of their children on the internet, and in the context we're taking a look at is through social media.

SPEAKER_00 9:11

Do you make any difference between the so-called public social media like Facebook or Instagram or Twitter and more private accounts like uh WhatsApp family groups or accounts where people actually have their privacy settings enabled?

SPEAKER_02 9:25

I think so. And what's interesting is that all types of different sites have do have privacy settings at different levels. Twitter, your account is either public or it's private. On Instagram, it's public or private. You know, on Facebook, it can be fully public or fully private or somewhere in the middle. Like you said, WhatsApp is an app where maybe you could have more restrictive settings. It's not meant to be so publicly facing. So I think that there definitely can be some differences based on the privacy settings that are available. I think a lot of it also comes down to how much people kind of trust a particular platform. So if they feel that Facebook is a trustworthy platform for them to share that information versus WhatsApp, a lot of it may have to do with how their behavior changes based on which platform or which app they might be using at that point.

SPEAKER_01 10:10

I think another thing to follow up on Alexa is that uh when she conducted the interviews for our study one, one of the things we were asking them is, you know, talk to me about your privacy settings. And so these are new moms for the most part. And most of them had not looked at their privacy settings in quite a while. So just because a platform has a privacy setting, and in theory you could set it so only families or only selected friends could could use it, that doesn't necessarily mean that parents are or doing it regularly or what's going on in that respect. I think another thing to consider is let's say you have it so only a family member can get access to it. There's nothing to prevent grandma or the new aunt from downloading the picture and sharing it independently. So you think you've got the space controlled, and you only, you know, these 20 family members and friends have access to this video of my child, but the next thing they have taken it, and maybe grandma's willing to show all these new things her first grandchild is doing it, and therefore it is now extended beyond the original use that the parent had in mind. So sharenting, even though it is combining parenting with sharing, is not necessarily constrained to parents. It could be used by anything, anybody. For example, a lot of my students are becoming, and I will say here, mostly the girls are becoming first-time aunts. And so I follow, you know, some of these uh students and former students on Instagram, and I'm seeing a lot of look at my new um niece or look at my new nephew picture. And so I'm getting pictures of a child I don't know. I don't know if the mom realizes that this stranger, even though I'm a nice person, this stranger is seeing pictures of her baby. And so charenting encompasses basically anybody who would take a child's picture and put it out on social media.

SPEAKER_00 12:07

Yeah, I guess I'm lucky that I grew up in the age before the internet so that that couldn't happen. I mean, embarrassing pictures would only be shown hard copy to friends of my parents.

SPEAKER_01 12:16

Well, and that's a good point because it was kept in control. Your your parents probably had a wallet or they had your school picture. At most, you sent a hard copy to the grandparents who put it in their wallet. They would not give the picture to a friend. They would say, Here, look at my picture, and then they would take it back. On the internet, when you post it, basically you're giving it to the online world.

SPEAKER_03 12:39

Right. Right. And I want to pick up on one thing when you talked about new parents that may not be checking their privacy settings, may not even notice that probably goes back to that long disclosure that no one reads that Paul and I spend our careers writing, knowing that no one reads them. But uh, when you talk about grandparents, I have to say I'm a grandmother now. Um, I can't deny it. I now have three of them. And yes, my daughter will share things on social media that yeah, Mimi here downloads everything and shares it on her social media. And I have a pretty big social media presence.

SPEAKER_00 13:14

Gildia's charged, Kate.

SPEAKER_03 13:16

I I know, right? My daughter knows privacy, she knows to set her privacy settings, but okay, I will admit I did ask her if I could download pictures to share, and she said yes. But I don't ask her for every single one of them. I just asked a blanket disclosure permission, and then I share everywhere.

SPEAKER_01 13:34

Well, Alexa, do you want to talk about that? The difference between if you get parents to agree to share, maybe she was okay that Mimi shared her pictures of her grandkids. Do you want to talk more about your perspective on should children's pictures be shared at all?

SPEAKER_02 13:52

Right. So I think that's also where we're coming from is we know that at this point, uh a lot of the work that we've done, particularly with this paper and some of the work we're continuing to do since then, it's been about children who are two years old and younger. And so these kids are you know, we're mostly looking at first-time moms and we're looking at mothers of young of young children too and younger. And so these children don't necessarily have the opportunity to know what's happening, or they can't understand, there's no form of consent, and there's no way that they can really have a sense of privacy. So what we're looking at is this idea of, you know, you may want it's it is one thing to ask the parent, like you said, a blanket statement or post by post, picture by picture. And it's another thing to know the child doesn't necessarily have a say in it either. And what's interesting is that we've studied, you know, we've looked at different types of literature that's kind of looked at parents in general are supposed to be making the best decisions they can or they're acting in their children's best interest on behalf on behalf of their child, that's what's assumed, you know, based on what they eat or what medical treatments they get or whatever the decisions might be throughout their life. And so, you know, when we're looking at the effect on children, we're also trying to take a look at these decisions, charenting-related decisions. You know, is this something that is in the best interest of the child? Because it is the mother's privacy and it also is the child's privacy, even though the child may not necessarily have a sense of what that looks like at this point in their life, eventually they will. And so we, you know, we've really tried to kind of study from different perspectives as far as other fields and how they've kind of taken a look at what these decisions look like. Parents making decisions in the best interest of their children.

SPEAKER_03 15:38

Oh, I love that. And I know I have so many follow-on questions. Paul's probably laughing at me. But one that I want to follow up on is California had the right to delete before they passed the CCPA. They had a right for children, and it wasn't a very clearly written law, but that people, once they became an adult, had the ability to go back and have social media deleted. And one of the questions that came up is does that mean children who, once they turn 18, can say, you need to go back in my parents' account and delete all of these pictures of me.

SPEAKER_02 16:14

Right. And I think it's not only that where, you know, what I think the other question comes up is what does delete exactly mean? Because it could be deleted from the parents' Facebook account. But as Maria was saying, you know, others could have possibly downloaded that picture and it could be elsewhere. And it would be hard to really sort of trace where that digital footprint has gone over the years. And so I think that probably is a challenge that as we look towards new regulation coming forward and people kind of questioning exactly what it means to just delete data, you know, how can we know exactly what that trail looks like? I think that's definitely going to pose some challenges for all people involved, all entities involved who are trying to make these decisions.

SPEAKER_00 16:59

So one of the things that that that strikes me is that of course, uh these pictures are going around. What consequences do you see for the children if their personal information is indeed so freely shared around the internet? Could there, I mean, they they could be negative, but could there also be something positive maybe for the children?

SPEAKER_02 17:18

Yeah, maybe I'll share a little bit about positive. And Maria, if you'd like to jump in and take a little bit more about the negative, I think as far as positive, I don't know how many truly positive opportunities there are for me to kind of look as far as far as consequences go. I think maybe one that I could see is um one thing we studied with our with our initial study, our interviews, is that we really tried to explore, you know, why parents look what their expressions of vulnerability are as they are pursuing some of these different um actions that they're taking, if they're expressing vulnerability in their actions and what their motives are for engaging in some of this behavior. And you know, a lot of what we heard was that they really wanted to seek social support and to try to cope with some anxiety or stress that they might be experiencing becoming a first-time mother. And so perhaps if parents, you know, feel happier or more calm because they've gained that social support from others and maybe they've learned from their experiences, you know, maybe the children could benefit from their parents being in that better state mentally and emotionally if they implement some of those practices from people that they learn from. I I think those could that could be a possible you know side effect, I guess maybe the parent feeling more confident in their decisions that could trickle down to the child.

SPEAKER_01 18:34

I was going to talk about some of the some of the negatives. Well, in the paper we discussed, and this is actually some information from Britain, just the the number of pedophile sites that grab children's images down. And so that's a security safety issue, etc. But also, and this is beyond our own expertise, who we're right, we're lying on the literature, just think about how children learn a sense of privacy. I mean, any any parent has had a toddler walk in the bathroom, right, when they were there. You lose all privacy when you're a young parent. And part of what we teach them is that there are certain parts of their body that are private that are to be covered up and not touched. There is the closure of a door that signals privacy, at least in our culture. And so part of what we do as parents, because I don't think I'm not sure when a child innately acquires a sense of privacy, but part of it is culturally expressed and changed. But then a child also has to be developmentally aware. So, for example, uh, Piaget talks about the idea when do children recognize that they can do something that somebody else doesn't see because little kids think that there's this omniscient presence that sees them, and so they feel guilty if they, you know, take the cookie off of a plate. But when do they realize mom did not see me take that cookie? Therefore, if mom did not see me, I don't disclose that I did. And so you've got some developmental things that are happening here, and this is beyond our research because this is more for the child development specialists. But I'm just curious how in this day and age, when you have children, we saw this in our interviews, that the experienced moms, so we had 10 interviews that had really young children under two, but then our first five interviews were with moms that had older children, and some of them were like six or seven years old and were like, Oh, take a video of me, post it on Facebook, oh, show me it. So the child was part of the co-creation of the post, and it was as much about the child parent bonding, oh no, I didn't like that. Reshoot me, I look cuter, I look funnier, I look this. And if you can imagine children who always feel like they're on, they are always on, and they they are, you know, the word curating, they're always curating their online presence. Now, does a five-year-old need to be curating an online presence because they're aware of you know, mom and dad, and they've never known mom and dad not filming everything. And of course, we've all seen stories about parents doing something uh designed to provoke a negative reaction in a child and filming it. Oh, isn't that funny? My child you know fell apart. Well, no one wants to get filmed on their worst days. And you know, what is the motivation of the parent and what does the parent get out of it? And then this is beyond our research, but some other people in Sharenting are looking at what happens when kids in elementary school start looking at that stuff and maybe start getting very upset with their parents for posting this. So that's that's developmentally, and again, for researchers who look at that, our negative from a marketing perspective is that the children children's online privacy protection act or COPA is designed to prevent marketers from collecting data directly from kids. So when kids are on the mobile apps or playing games or whatever, like they're all doing now that we're all quarantined, marketers should not be collecting any personal data from the children without first getting permission. Than the parents. But what happens when a marketer goes on and says, Hey, stuck at home with your kids? You know, take a picture of Blink and tag us for a chance to oftentimes win this or win that, or have a chance for us to repost it if we really like it. Of course, every child wants to be the next YouTube star, as we're kind of finding out. And so here you have an opportunity for marketers and others to get access to children's data that bypasses COPA because they're collecting children data not from children, which would force them to adhere to COPPA, but about children because others are giving it up. And it's especially problematic. We see it when parents are supposed to be the frontline defense on protecting their children against anything. And so that has been our concern, and what we've been, you know, pointing out in our writing to uh regulators is that the marketers are getting children's data and they're bypassing COPA by getting it from the moms, especially first-time moms who appear to be more vulnerable because they're using social media as a way to help them through this transition to a new sense of self that they've never had before. Right.

SPEAKER_00 23:07

Yeah, I may I just come back to to the point you made on the omnipresent person, because I really recognize that from my own youth. And maybe just to share something from my yester years, when I was a kid, my mother used to have a sweatshirt from the musical Cats. Uh and they were black in front with just the logo of the musical, but on the back of the sweatshirt were two cats' eyes. And my mother always used to tell me that she could see from her back through those eyes, and I believed it as a kid. It was a very effective way of parenting, to be honest. And it's almost a pity that kids these days maybe don't believe in in those kind of stories anymore.

SPEAKER_03 23:46

Right. Well, you know, kids growing up, it's it's a case, and your dogs do it as well. I I have dogs too, but if they can't see you, you can't see them kind of thing. And so I I love the growing up around that. And uh one of the things you mentioned about recording things that their children do wrong, like if they're throwing a fit or something. I remember the famous video going around of a was it a child back talking the grandmother or something like that? And it was a little bitty child, like maybe three, and they were laughing at this child defiantly talking back to the authority figure. And I all I could think of was, but you're filming it and you're laughing it while you're filming it. How is that child learning that what they're doing is wrong when you can you imagine parents going, oh, do that again. I need to film it, correct? But then teach them that it's wrong, correct. I'm confused, I'm confused for that.

SPEAKER_01 24:42

And that's an interesting point because in the interviews, what we've heard over and over is every mom wants to be a good mom, and they're trying to navigate what does it mean to be a good mom? And so most of the parents that we the or the 10 mothers that we talked to did not talk about putting up meltdowns. In fact, they were very aggressive because that can make them look like they weren't a good mother, which is you know counter to the example that you gave because you're questioning, you're not much of a parent if you're not correcting this kind of behavior and you're actually encouraging it. And no, let's let's do another take on it as if they are actors trying to get the right emotions going for your posting of your video that you hope generates enough likes and goes viral, etc. So I I think there's there's a lot going on here, both on the the implications for the child and then you know the motivations of the parents.

SPEAKER_02 25:35

We saw a lot of wanting things to be, you know, Pinterest perfect or or social media worthy, and people wanted to show the very best of their children. And you know, I think that again, this isn't anything new. Everybody wants their kids to be on their best behavior, so to speak, in front of others. Um, but then there was a lot of competitiveness that came in. You know, we would see um evidence of women saying that they would feel, you know, less than because, oh, look at what this person's child is doing already. Or, you know, there was one interviewee who had similarly aged children with some of her closest friends. And so she was always using social media as a way to compare what those people's children were doing compared to hers. And I so I think that's another issue there is that people want to use it in some cases to really try to appear as perfectly as they can and their kids to appear as perfectly as they can, and that creates a false sense of reality that maybe people don't necessarily feel like they can keep up with if everybody else's life, every kid, every parent has it all together, you know, what's wrong with me? So that's definitely evidence that we saw in our interviews as well.

SPEAKER_03 26:41

Oh my goodness, because you know, when I was growing up, it was a case of reading, you know, parenting magazine, and you know, and it's bad enough to be compared to a magazine that comes out once a month, much less being deluged from them on online.

unknown 26:54

Right.

SPEAKER_00 26:55

So one of the things you did in your in your study was the series of interviews, but you also followed and then subsequently coded a Twitter chat. Can you tell us more about that?

SPEAKER_02 27:07

Sure. So we um had the opportunity to collect tweets that occurred over the course of a Twitter chat that Carters ran as an opportunity to engage with their consumers online. And many brands do this. You know, social media marketing tactics now are becoming certainly a big part of how marketers try to engage with their customers and really build up a good relationship. And so we were able to actually see how this kind of occurred over time. They asked 10 questions over the course of an hour and people respond to those questions. And what was interesting was that some of the questions were centered around trying to drum up some conversation about their products, you know, what are some of the outfits or accessories, even to uh to kind of get back to our original question that you can't live without these kinds of things for your children. And some of them directly, you know, the question might say something like, you know, share a photo to give us some evidence essentially of how, you know, um your child might have been experiencing or you know, a funny moment with your child or something along these lines. And so what we saw was that there were direct requests for people to share information about their child. And so we were actually able to collect the tweets and then we were able to create a Python script that automatically kind of went through and assessed for children's personally identifiable information. So we took a actual, you know, the legal definition of what that looks like. So from name to location to birthday to photos are included because it's a visual representation of them and it and it's actually something that you can again identify them with. And we looked for evidence of person identifiable information being revealed through their responses to a question directly being asked by the brand. And so this was an interesting way for us to also have the opportunity to code for expressions of vulnerability within their responses. So this is something that came up as a very interesting finding from our interviews, and we were able to kind of carry it over and see in the Twitter chat if expressions of mother's vulnerability was being portrayed in their Twitter responses, as well as if personally identifiable information was being shared.

SPEAKER_01 29:28

And so, for example, here was one of the questions that was asked during the Twitter chat Do you have the most stylish baby on the block? Prove it. What's your best style advice? And so, as Alexa had pointed out to me, every young mom has lots of pictures of her baby on her phone. So it was not that big a deal while she is on the phone doing this chat on Twitter to immediately upload a picture to prove that in fact she had a stylish child. So there are other examples that was not in the Twitter chat, but you can see them in the feed of Carter specifically say, share a picture of your child like Twins Day or in their favorite jammies, or so there was a lot of really explicit requests about sharing pictures or videos, more so videos in other platforms, but specifically share pictures of your children.

SPEAKER_00 30:16

Do they include any information on how they are going to further use those pictures or how long are they going to keep them? Uh, where will they be reposted? Is is any of that transparent?

SPEAKER_02 30:28

Well, there was a link to kind of a very, you know, as you mentioned, a disclosure that was very written very much from a legal perspective, and it kind of shares how you know you need to agree to these terms and conditions in order to participate in the chat. One of the conditions of the chat was that you had to have a public Twitter account so that the tweets could be seen, because part of what was actually, you know, the prize, so to speak, was a gift card. So in order to be eligible to win that gift card, your tweets had to be seen, and that means that they had to be public. And I think the challenge is that a lot of people see that they may be technically agreeing to the fact that, yes, I realize that by participating with a public Twitter account, it means the information is out there, but they may or may not actually, as you know, probably be reading and really actually understanding what it is that they're agreeing to or fully understand, you know, the implications of that. And so I think when brands are kind of encouraging a conversation like this, like in the form of a Twitter chat, it feels it ends up feeling a little bit more like a conversation between friends, or that's what they want it to feel like, more than an actual marketer or consumer relationship. So people may kind of feel that the casual nature of social media lets them feel a little more comfortable, maybe than they necessarily should. Um, and so that's another angle that, you know, especially after we took a look at the tweets and we were able to kind of analyze and see the evidence of many of the participants, more than two-thirds of the participants expressing some level of vulnerability, nearly half the participants sharing some aspect of their child's personally identifiable information in response to a question, these kinds of things, we really thought that, you know, maybe brands should kind of take a step back and say, you know, we want to be relatable, but at the same time, are people in maybe not the right frame of mind and not fully really remembering the relationship of marketer to consumer instead of friends talking on the internet? Um, and so that's one area that we really think marketers could, you know, kind of take a look at is making sure that they don't necessarily um come off as as quite uh the same as just kind of having a conversation with a girlfriend, so to speak. Yeah, they really don't have their best interests at heart.

SPEAKER_01 32:38

Well, and and to piggyback off what Alexa had to say, we included in our paper the actual um fine print. If you had clicked everything through, what does carters actually have? Well, they apparently have um without compensation access to this user-generated content in perpetuity to use in any manner or media now or later developed for any purpose, commercial advertising or otherwise, and then they go on, including the right to distribute it. And so I was watching as the Twitter chat unfolded, they had mom influencers participating, so they're jumping in and saying things. And so, in the middle of the Twitter chat, they did do a post that had a link to the rules, but everything's happening so quickly, you know, no mom is stopping to go through. And this is a lengthy document. I had to look through very closely to find the page and you know, find the section, and I'm gonna, oh Lexa, look at this section here. Can you believe the moms are participating in real time here? They don't realize they've basically given Carters access to everything because they have a public account, and then even if the the mom did not post about her child all the pieces, you could then go through and click through the mother's account. And if you wanted to look at her profile or look at some of the other stuff, if a mom's posting about her kids in a Twitter chat, there's she's also posting a lot about her child in her profile that has now been made public so she can even participate because by golly, they're giving away a chance for four $100 gift cards. And another and another thing that we did is we looked at some of other Carter's posts, even those that said, Hey, you know, happy Mother's Day, show us a picture of you know, you enjoying your child and Mother's Day. Those did not have the same level of engagement. In other words, responding back with here's a picture of us, not near the level of engagement, like two or three posts in response compared to the hundreds of mothers that participated in this one-hour chat that they could win one of four $100 gift cards. So all of the bells and whistles were there. If you were a marketer scripting this, it was a Twitter chat. You had, as Alexis said, an admin who sounded like your girlfriend asking about your child, and you had all these other women talking about their children. So there's almost a little one-up. Here's a picture of my kid, here's a picture of my kid, and here's a picture of my kid. You had mom influencers being paid to participate. They announced it because we began following some of the mom influencers. They announced the Twitter chat, in addition to Carter's announcing it, and then you had incentivization there. So everything was sounds very devious. Yes. I'm not sure it was devious as it was strategic. It was everything of if the marketers were not thinking about do you realize the kind of data you're going to end up getting? It would have been something I would have taught my campaign students to do.

SPEAKER_03 35:24

Right. But I think you also have to take into mind that you the disclaimer that Maria was talking about, you probably have to have a law degree to fully understand what it says or go through it word by word. But not only that, you have to have some degree of, shall we call it paranoia to actually click on the link to go read it too when you're in this perfect marketing storm to get the material.

SPEAKER_02 35:47

I actually was interested in uh one of your previous guests on the podcast, Peter Stockberger. He had mentioned that, you know, the with the new CCPA Act, he had mentioned if you don't necessarily claim, for example, that you sell data, but you benefit in any way from actually using that data, then it violates that new act. And I think that's another interesting aspect of it is you know, you may have these really lengthy legal documents, like you said, you have to be an attorney to really understand them. But even so, the document may, if with looking at this new act, it may be written in such a way where if companies are prompting charenting, you know, through social media marketing tactics, they may really try to reassure parents that the data won't be sold. You know, it may really be written in that disclosure, so to speak, but if they're benefiting from that in any way, what the parents share, if it if the post goes viral and you know, Carter's gets a lot of attention and people end up then as a result visiting their website and making a purchase on Carters.com, for example, as a result of that post, you know, maybe it would be violating that regulation. And that's going to be really challenging when it comes to, you know, we as marketers, we talk about the potential of earned media. So in other words, other people talking about your company, your brand, how that can be really powerful because it establishes a lot of credibility with consumers. It's not just the company saying how great they are, but other people are talking about it. So now if we have, you know, for example, parents doing that, talking about how great their child looks in that brand's clothing, for example, and the company's benefiting from it in some way, what are the implications for some of those uh, you know, new laws and regulation that's being put forward? How are we gonna track that? It's gonna be probably a challenge.

SPEAKER_03 37:30

It is, and that is a wonderful segue into one of the questions that we had about most of your research was done here in the United States. Have you looked or considered what this same research or findings would look like if it was in the EU under the GDPR, which is a very strong privacy law? That's probably the strongest. There's there's Canada, there's Latin America, there's some others to talk about. But have you looked at doing this kind of study under a different legal regime?

SPEAKER_02 38:00

I think it would be interesting to definitely take a look at what the cross-cultural effects would look like and what it would look like, like you said, in different legal environments. Um, I think this could definitely be an interesting avenue for future research. As you said, both of us being in the US, we started here. But I do think, you know, the experience of being a first-time parent is gonna be the same cross-culturally. I think you're always probably gonna experience levels of vulnerability change. You know, you're going from the stage of being not pregnant to pregnant and then being pregnant to being a mom and you're learning as you go. I think that's probably pretty universal. There's gonna be uncertainty and insecurity. So I think, you know, that idea wouldn't change, but it might just change kind of based on, you know, exactly what the legal situation might look like in that particular country. So I think we could definitely consider that in the future as an interesting opportunity.

SPEAKER_03 38:49

Well, when you're watching these Twitter storms, uh, Maria, when you're watching these Twitter storms, is there any indication that there are moms participating that are outside the United States, or is there any acknowledgement by the companies that the people participating might not be in the US?

SPEAKER_01 39:06

If I recall from Carter's, I'm pretty sure it had to be the US to even participate. I don't know. I follow, I have Twitter friends, a lot of Twitter friends in in England and stuff, and so sharenting is not limited to the US. I think we think sharenting is a I mean, every parent is proud of their child. And so I don't think that that behavior is unique. What I'm not saying to my feeds is I, because of what I the brands I follow, I am not following any non-US specific brands, or else they are adjusting it because it's being delivered to a you know a consumer in the US. I'm not seeing any post that I'm feeling like, oh, this is clearly a British or a Spanish brand that is then asking me to share. But that could be simply a matter of you know, programmatic advertising or something where they're not placing it in the US. So it may be that Paul sees something different, and that would be an interesting collaboration is to have uh colleagues in the US or in the other countries go, well, what are you seeing in your feed? Do you see anything like we're seeing in the US? Because we're seeing a lot of it. I know we've talked a lot about cars because that was our case study, but I have lots of examples on mine. Uh Alexa has lots of examples on cars, feeds that we have used when we've done presentations, whether they are officially children's brands, like Infomil, the formula, as well as Target. One of the things that we know that parents love to do is post milestones first month, second month, third month. And there's a lot of here's a picture of the child with some number beside the child and some configuration. And we have examples of Target posting and requesting share your milestones. And I think they have the example I have is uh one with a four-month-old child. And so that is a very common thing. It's not just children's brands, and a lot a lot of you see also I don't have young children in my life, but because I follow children's brands, they must think I do because I get a lot of promoted tweets, right? And so you can clearly see where if you follow the right brands, you'll start getting tweets from brands that are encouraging you to share about your children. And I don't know if anybody else is saying that, but I know I am.

SPEAKER_00 41:27

Yeah, it sounds like we could continue this conversation for many hours. There are so many, many more questions, but the time is limited too. I want to be conscious of your time as well. Um, so maybe to wrap up one final question, what is your main recommendation for young parents and also for companies to ensure the protection of children's data online?

SPEAKER_02 41:49

Well, I think when it comes to mothers, young parents, um, I think their interactions being more like that of a friend to a friend versus, you know, keeping in mind the brand to consumer relationship. Um, I think that employee making them feel comfortable to share more than they normally would is really important. So we just really advise them to make sure they remember that they are engaging with a brand. And that brand may have different motives in mind than fellow mothers, you know, their friends uh, for example. And I think when it comes to the government, you know, the FTC would really do well to try to provide some guidance and some education to parents and even to social networks like Twitter and Facebook, and maybe some different types of organizations, like nonprofit organizations or for-profit organizations about marketing data collection practices about children, which is not currently covered by COPA, as Maria mentioned earlier. So, really making people aware of the fact that, you know, when they share, there is kind of that loophole that isn't covered by COPPA. And in general, we really advise marketers to stop practices that encourage parents to divulge their children's personally identifiable information because the unintended audience in these situations really has the potential to become very large. And again, if people aren't necessarily recognizing that, I think that it's in marketers' best interest to really make sure that they are trying to, you know, not encourage that and and to try to make sure the consumers know a little bit more about the environment that they're sharing in.

SPEAKER_01 43:23

And then something very simple for a brand is that if a if anyone tags you in a tweet or post and has a picture of a child, don't share it. Don't retweet it, don't regram it, don't share it. You can still like like we're being told now, social distancing. I think social distancing also has a role to play here. You know, we've seen that image where the one match steps out of line so it doesn't ignite the rest. But I think there's a position here where the brands can be aware that, hey, yes, they're they're sending us pictures. But the other thing is that some of these, um, like Twitter, if Krispy Kreme likes a post that has a child in it, because I follow Krispy Kreme, that post ends up in my feed. And so that's where a platform can say, we're not going to do that anymore. So there's there's there's a room for a lot of players in here to come together for the protection of children's online privacy.

SPEAKER_00 44:17

Well, thank you both so much. This this was a really valuable conversation. I think a lot of our listeners can learn a lot here. The full paper called Smart Devices, Smart Decisions: Implications of Parent Charenting for Children's Online Privacy and Investigation of Mothers was published last year in the Journal of Public Policy and Marketing of the American Marketing Association. We'll post a link in the show notes. Thank you both, Alexa and Maria, for being on the program today. We uh we look forward to having you back at some point in the future when you've done all the follow-up work uh that undoubtedly will uh will spring to mind. For all our listeners, if you like the series, please do tell your friends and colleagues about us as well. Should you have any questions or suggestions, please reach out to us via seriousprivacy at truststark.com or via Twitter at podcastprivacy. You will find Kay on Twitter as Heart of Privacy and myself as EuropolB. Thank you again for listening to Sirius Privacy and until our next episode. Goodbye.

SPEAKER_03 45:15

Bye y'all.