ProTechThem: Digital Ethnography Data, 2013-2022

This data collection contains anonymised extracts from a passive digital ethnography of “sharenting” in open/public online communities, capturing how adults disclose information about children in everyday posts and interactions. The study was motivated by growing concerns about the potential risks and harms of sharing child-related content online, alongside limited empirical evidence about what is actually shared in naturalistic online settings and how online audiences respond. To enable cross-cultural comparison, the dataset draws on English-language communities with a largely UK-based audience (while including other English speakers) and Italian-language communities where sharers communicate in Italian, spanning multiple sharenting-relevant contexts such as parenting advice, special needs and ADHD support, child modelling, travel, and family legal issues. Communities were selected through purposive sampling guided by ethical commitments: only forums and groups that were publicly accessible were included, and sampled spaces had to contain posts focused on sharenting themes (i.e., disclosures about children). Over a three-month observation period (January-April 2022), researchers observed group activity and, where relevant, reviewed earlier content (in some cases back to 2013). Using a structured observation grid developed and refined by the research team, posts that showed clear indicators of potentially harmful sharenting were manually extracted rather than collected through automated scraping, given the sensitivity of the material. Extracts include the textual content of posts and researcher descriptions of any images or videos, along with contextual variables such as platform, date, group topic, sharenter role (e.g., mother/father/carer), the type of sharenting (deliberate or unintentional), and the nature of comments and community norms. All extracted material was immediately anonymised, stored securely in Excel in line with UK GDPR and institutional ethics requirements, and stripped of personal identifiers to protect privacy. The dataset also captures surrounding discourse, how sharers, other members, and moderators discuss motivations, risks, harms, and informal rules, providing a rich resource for studying the social dynamics, norms, and ethical tensions that shape sharenting practices in public online environments.

The ProTechThem project combined traditional and innovative cross-disciplinary approaches to explore the risks that “sharenting” practice poses to affected children. “Sharenting” occurs when parents, guardians, schools, and relatives such as grandparents share children’s information and images on social media. The practice can expose affected children to identity-related harms and other risks. It can also affect their rights to an identity, autonomy, and privacy under Articles 8, 12, and 16 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the child (UNCRC). ProTechThem project expands current knowledge of sharenting practices, underpinning motives, and associated harms. Outputs from the project include an animated awareness raising video, a risk awareness checklist, and an LLM for detecting harmful child-centric content online. Data from a passive digital ethnography of public online communities/groups of parents communicating in English and Italian language, (which was conducted as part of the project), are available here. A period of three months from January to April 2022 was spent observing each group’s activities, sometimes going as far back as 2013. The digital ethnography shed light on several dimensions of sharenting including harms such as privacy violations that can contaminate the digital and online identities of affected children. Over the past 20 years, the creation of new "online identities" (the social identity that we acquire in cyberspace) and the expansion of the usability of our "digital identity" (the digital storage of our attributed, biographical or even biological identities) have produced several advantages along with emerging crime risks. Identity information can be misused in many ways leading to severe harms including identity-related crimes. Existing research in this context has so far focused on the illegal access to personal information (e.g. through hacking or social engineering techniques). The extant literature has overlooked the risky behaviours of individuals willingly sharing identifying (and potentially sensitive) information online. In this context, an area of particular interest that has been particularly ignored is the one connected to the sharing of identifying and sensitive information of children, who are often overexposed online in good faith by parents and guardians in so called "sharenting" practices. Beyond risks due to the negative psychological repercussions of ignoring children's desire to have (or not have) an online identity, there are concerns regarding the potential for grooming and child abuse. Identity-related harms (such as identity fraud and identity theft) are additional risks. Identity contamination more broadly could affect the ability of today's children to employ digital verification tools increasingly required to access official documents such as passports. They will need a clean and safely curated digital identity to be fully part of many aspects of society. The ProTechThem project expands current knowledge of sharenting practices, underpinning motives, and associated harms. It provides a better understanding of existing technical and regulatory gaps enabling harmful sharenting practices. It also develops a better understanding of the perception of the problem by parents and guardians (our "target population"). The project will therefore enable better targeted awareness-raising activities, to improve the tools currently available for studying, preventing, and mitigating the negative impacts of sharenting. The results of this research will be of significant importance to social media users (specifically for those in our target population) as it will raise awareness and promote sustained behavioural change to minimise cyber risks. The results will also be of relevance to the work of law enforcement authorities and policy makers. It will help inform better approaches to addressing identity-related crimes and other harms facilitated by certain sharenting practices. More generally, the proposed approach will improve our understanding of criminogenic opportunities available on social media, supporting new avenues of investigation. By integrating insights and expertise from criminological and computer sciences, the project also has important implications for demonstrating interdisciplinary methodological developments and promoting best practice for ethical online research. The research project was structured around seven cumulative work-packages to allow the research team to build a solid body of original data (currently not available to researchers) and also promote engagement and effective communication with non-academic audiences (primarily, law enforcement authorities, policy makers, schools, parents, and guardians). At various stages of the project, we were supported by our Project Partners (UK Safer Internet Centre; Kidscape; Arma dei Carabinieri); together with Dame Prof. Wendy Hall and other stakeholders in our Advisory Board.