Whose Information Should Be Shared With Whom?: Parents’ Awareness Of Children’s Digital Privacy In Turkey

Today, parents make use of social media accounts for many different purposes, such as obtaining information, giving advice, receiving support, and exchanging ideas with other parents. In parallel with the use of social media, according to their parenting roles, individuals frequently share various content related to both their own daily practices and the development processes of their children. The fact that most of the content shared is about children raises the question of digital privacy in this context. Based on this focus, this research aims to determine the priorities attached by the parents when they share content about children on their social media accounts, and what kind of measures they take in sharing this content to protect the digital privacy of their children. Therefore, a questionnaire based quantitative field study was carried out within the scope of this research. As a result of the study, it was found that parents primarily prefer sharing special occasions with their children, family photographs and photographs of their children at early ages; if the child is at a later age, they tend to consult him/her before sharing the content, but they do not tend to pay enough attention to ensuring that the child's identity is kept confidential and sharing of personal information is avoided.