Children are at risk from parents posting online, says UN

PARENTS who share pictures of their children on social media are putting their human rights at risk, the United Nations has warned.

The UN’S special rapporteur, Joseph Cannataci, said that “strong guidelines” were needed to preserve the rights of children whose parents upload video and images of them.

Visiting the UK to assess the privacy situation, he found that children of nursery age were being surveilled by CCTV at school and in their bedrooms.

He said there could be a rising number of cases involving children who later say their rights have been infringed because their parents had posted videos and images of them on the internet.

“How do you deal with parents who insist on taking a video of their kids all the time and posting it on Youtube every single day?

“We’ve already seen the very first cases of kids suing their parents because of the stuff they have posted on Facebook about them,” he said. In 2016 an Austrian teenager sued her parents in an effort to force them to remove childhood pictures of her from Facebook, arguing that they were embarrassing and a violation of her privacy.

He said some nurseries used their CCTV as a “selling point” for “anxious parents to check what’s going on”.

“This has been fuelled further by all the reports we’ve seen of abuse of patients in care homes and people being caught on CCTV, and sometimes the same allegations have been made about children’s facilities,” he added.

Mr Cannataci said children “require increased protection” from companies who collect and share their data. His investigation had not yet established whether new legislation was required.