Your growth is my growth: examining sharenting behaviours from a multiparty privacy perspective

ABSTRACT Sharenting, a behaviour that parents share children’s personal information online, has brought about multiple privacy concerns and risks. Parents are criticised for violating children’s privacy and putting their identities at risk of being stolen. Existing sharenting studies tried to explain the sharenting behaviour based on the assumption that shared content is solely owned by children. This study, adopting a multiparty privacy perspective, proposed that sharenting content includes information owned solely by children and co-owned by parents and children, emphasizing the importance of recognizing information co-ownership by parents. By conducting 16 in-depth interviews, the current study investigated parents’ perceptions of sharenting content and explored factors that may influence sharenting behaviours. Results indicated that parents have a misunderstanding of information ownership and are unaware of children’s rights to co-owned information. Also, the sharenting behaviours are also influenced by audiences’ comments, family members’ privacy perceptions, cultural values, and exposure to negative news.