Parents Who Share Info About Their Kids Online Are a Cybersecurity Risk. Here’s Why.
It’s adorable to hear about the newborn, the birthdays, the accomplishments. But it is just giving more information to future identity thieves.
3 min
There are few things more heartwarming than seeing parents posting about their children on social media. Their names, their pictures, their birthdays, their accomplishments, their teachers, their pets. What parents wouldn’t want the world to know how wonderful their child is?
In recent years, however, such “sharenting” has gotten some pushback for violating children’s privacy, and depriving them of choices about their online identities. How, some people are asking, will my 21-year-old daughter feel one day about what I’m sharing now?
But what has gotten little attention is how sharenting also should raise concerns about their children’s future online security.
Starts before birth
It all, of course, seems so innocuous and precious, and starts even before birth. Parents post images of their scans, with due dates included, to social-media sites. Both parents are usually tagged. The follow-up is a birth announcement, which normally includes the child’s full name, date of birth, time of birth, weight and hospital. Milestones are next: the child’s first steps, first holiday, first pet, first word, best friend, favourite food.
If these milestones sound familiar, it is because they are routinely used as answers to the security “challenge” questions that we use to get into online accounts when we forget our passwords. One survey on password choice found that 42% of British people use either a pet’s name, a family member’s name or a significant date as their password. You want to hack into somebody’s account 10 years from now? Just look back online and see the name of a first pet or a first-grade teacher. It’s all probably going to be there for the taking.
Barclays Bank warned that by 2030, after another decade of parents gleefully and unknowingly sharenting at current rates, 7.4 million identity-theft cases could occur a year. The Identity Theft Resource Center warns that by combining information from social media, such as name, date of birth and address, along with the troves of hacked personal data available to buy cheaply on the dark web, such as Social Security numbers, a scammer has all the details needed to open up a bank account or take out a loan in a child’s name.
The pandemic has compounded this issue.One study found that many schools encouraged parents to post videos to social media to keep children connected, increasing the volume of personal information about children’s home lives being shared online.
Thousands of photos
By their fifth birthday, the average child will have around 1,500 photos of themselves shared online. This means that by the age of 13, when children are allowed to use social-media sites themselves, there could already be almost 4,000 photos depicting them online. Those figures don’t include children of parent influencers, who build careers around posting information about their children to a worldwide fan base completely unknown to them, with unknown trustworthiness.
An emerging threat to children is the use of AI technology used to create deep fakes: images, videos, GIFs, sounds or voices manipulated to look or sound like someone else. Given the vast volume of children’s images and videos posted online by their parents, malicious creation of deep fakes could be used by cyberbullies or school bullies.
When posting information online, parents don’t normally ask their children for their consent. Yet consider this: The U.K. Safer Internet Centre’s survey on young people’s experiences online found that 46% of them felt anxious and out of control of their information when they discovered posts about themselves online that they hadn’t been aware of. A further 44% felt angry, with only 15% seemingly being indifferent.
Coming explosion
It’s clear that this information is a ticking time bomb, and likely to result in an explosion of embarrassment and angst for our children as they grow up, as well as exposing them to identity theft.
What can we do about it? For one thing, parents should be aware that their shout-outs about their children—however well-meaning—could cause real long-term damage to the people they most love.
In addition, our social-media privacy settings can help control the audience that sees our posts. Ensuring we are comfortable with which social-media platforms we use, how our profiles are set up, how public our posts are, and what information we are giving away can help us make informed choices on how our children’s digital footprints are shaping up.
Understanding the real-world consequences of sharenting allows us all to make better-informed choices on our decision to post or not to post. We all want to give our children the best lives they can possibly live. Let’s not undermine it by constantly telling the world how wonderful they are.
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Chinese users of Xiaohongshu, or Little Red Book, welcome Americans fleeing a feared TikTok ban
5 min
They call themselves TikTok refugees—and the app they are fleeing to is a lot more Chinese than the video-sharing app whose U.S. fate now hangs in the balance.
After Supreme Court justices Friday seemed inclined to let stand a law that would shut down TikTok in the U.S., the Chinese social-media platform Xiaohongshu , translated in English as Little Red Book, has received a flood of American TikTok users. They are looking for a sanctuary or a way to protest the potentially imminent TikTok ban—never mind that they don’t speak Chinese.
Charlotte Silverstein, a 32-year-old publicist in Los Angeles, downloaded Xiaohongshu on Sunday night after seeing videos on TikTok about migrating to the app, which Americans dubbed “RedNote.” She described the move as a “last act of defiance” in her frustration about the potential TikTok ban.
“Everyone has been super welcoming and sweet,” said Silverstein, who has made three posts so far. “I love the sense of community that I’m seeing already.”
By Monday, TikTok refugees had pushed Xiaohongshu to the top of the free-app chart on Apple ’s App Store.
“I’m really nervous to be on this app, but I also find it to be really exciting and thrilling that we’re all doing this,” one new Xiaohongshu user said in a video clip on Sunday. “I’m sad that TikTok might actually go, but if this is where we’re gonna be hanging out, welcome to my page!” Within a day, the video had more than 3,000 comments and 6,000 likes. And the user had amassed 24,000 followers.
Neither Xiaohongshu nor TikTok responded to requests for comment.
The flow of refugees, while serving as a symbolic dissent against TikTok’s possible shutdown, doesn’t mean Xiaohongshu can easily serve as a replacement for Americans. TikTok says it has 170 million users in the U.S., and it has drawn many creators who take advantage of the app’s features to advertise and sell their products.
Most of the content on Xiaohongshu is in Chinese and the app doesn’t have a simple way to auto-translate the posts into English.
At a time of a strained U.S.-China relationship, some new Chinese-American friendships are budding on an app that until now has had few international users.
“I like that two countries are coming together,” said Sarah Grathwohl, a 32-year-old marketing manager in Seattle, who made a Xiaohongshu account on Sunday night. “We’re bonding over this experience.”
Granthwohl doesn’t speak Chinese, so she has been using Google Translate for help. She said she isn’t concerned about data privacy and would rather try a new Chinese app than shift her screentime to Instagram Reels.
Another opportunity for bonding was a photo of English practice questions from a Chinese textbook, with the caption, “American please.” American Xiaohongshu users helped answer the questions in the comments, receiving a “thank u Honey,” from the person who posted the questions.
By Monday evening, there have been more than 72,000 posts with the hashtag #tiktokrefugee on Xiaohongshu, racking up some 34 million views.
In an English-language post titled “Welcome TikTok refugees,” posted by a Shanghai-based Xiaohongshu user, an American user responded in Chinese with a cat photo and the words, “Thank you for your warm welcome. Everyone is so cute. My cat says thanks, too.” The user added, “I hope this is the correct translation.”
Some Chinese users are also using the livestreaming function to invite TikTok migrants to chat. One chat room hosted by a Chinese English tutor had more than 179,900 visits with several Americans exchanging cultural views with Chinese users.
ByteDance-owned TikTok isn’t available in China but has a Chinese sister app, Douyin. American users can’t download Douyin, though; unlike Xiaohongshu, it is only accessible from Chinese app stores.
On Xiaohongshu, Chinese users have been sharing tutorials and tips in English for American users on how to use the app. Meanwhile, on TikTok, video clips have also multiplied over the past two days teaching users the correct pronunciation of Xiaohongshu—shau-hong-SHOO—and its culture.
Xiaohongshu may be new to most Americans, but in China, it is one of the most-used social-media apps. Backed by investors like Chinese tech giants Tencent Holdings and Alibaba Group , Xiaohongshu is perhaps best described as a Chinese mix of Instagram and Reddit and its users increasingly treat it as a search engine for practical information.
Despite its Little Red Book name, Xiaohongshu has little in common with the compilation of Mao Zedong ’s political writings and speeches. In fact, the app aspires to be a guidebook about anything but politics.
Conceived as a shopping guide for affluent urbanites in 2013, Xiaohongshu has morphed into a one-stop shop for lifestyle and shopping recommendations. Every day, its more than 300 million users, who skew toward educated young women, create, share and search for posts about anything from makeup tutorials to career-development lessons, game strategies or camping skills.
Over the years, Xiaohongshu users have developed a punchy writing style, with posts accompanied by images and videos for an Instagram feel.
Chinese social-media platforms are required to watch political content closely. Xiaohongshu’s focus on lifestyle content, eschewing anything that might seem political, makes it less of a regulatory target than a site like Weibo , which in 2021 was fined at least $2.2 million by China’s cyberspace watchdog for disseminating “illegal information.”
“I don’t expect to read news or discussion of serious issues on Xiaohongshu,” said Lin Ying, a 26-year-old game designer in Beijing.
The American frenzy over a Chinese app is the reverse of a migration in recent years by Chinese social-media users seeking refuge from censorship on Western platforms , such as X, formerly known as Twitter, or, more recently, BlueSky.
Just like TikTok users who turn to the app for fun, Xiaohongshu users also seek entertainment through livestreams and short video clips as well as photos and text-posts on the platform.
Xiaohongshu had roughly 1.3 million U.S. mobile users in December, according to market-intelligence firm Sensor Tower, which estimates that U.S. downloads of the app in the week ending Sunday almost tripled compared with the week before.
Sensor Tower data indicates that Xiaohongshu became the top-ranked social-networking and overall free app on Apple’s App Store and the 8th top-ranked social app on the Google Play Store on Monday, “a feat it has never achieved before,” said Abe Yousef, senior insights analyst at Sensor Tower.
Run by Shanghai-based Xingin Information Technology, Xiaohongshu makes money primarily from advertising, according to a Xiaohongshu spokeswoman. The company was valued at $17 billion after its latest round of private-equity investment in the summer, according to research firm PitchBook Data.
Not everyone is singing kumbaya. Some Chinese Xiaohongshu users are worried about the language barrier. And some American TikTok users are concerned about data safety on the Chinese app.
But many are hoping to build bridges between the two countries.
“Y’all might think Americans are hateful because of how our politicians are, but I promise you not all of us are like that,” one American woman said on a Sunday video she posted on Xiaohongshu with Chinese subtitles.
She went on to show how to make cheese quesadillas using a waffle maker.
The video collected more than 11,000 likes and 3,000 comments within 24 hours. “It’s so kind of you to use Chinese subtitles,” read one popular comment posted by a user from Sichuan province.
Another Guangdong-based user commented with a bilingual “friendly reminder”: “On Chinese social-media platforms please do not mention sensitive topics such as politics, religion and drugs!!!”
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Just 55 minutes from Sydney, make this your creative getaway located in the majestic Hawkesbury region.
