ProTechThem: Digital Harms of Sharenting. Survey and Interview Data, UK and Italy, 2022-2024

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This data collection brings together four complementary datasets on parents’ practices and perceptions of sharing information about their children online (“sharenting”), combining nationally weighted surveys with in-depth qualitative interviews in the UK and Italy. The motivation is to provide a robust, comparative evidence base on how and why parents post (or avoid posting) content about children on social media and online platforms, how they assess and manage privacy and risk, and what harms or negative experiences they and their families may encounter. By integrating large-scale survey data with interview narratives, the collection supports both population-level description and detailed exploration of decision-making, norms, and lived experience across two national contexts. Two survey datasets capture patterns of posting behaviour, platform use, motivations, privacy settings and protective strategies, perceptions of risk and concern, exposure to safety information, and experiences of online harms. The UK survey includes responses from 1,013 parents recruited via the YouGov panel and weighted to be representative of UK adults with children under 18; the Italian survey includes 506 parents recruited via the YouGov Italian panel and weighted to be representative of Italian adults with children under 18. Both surveys are provided as SPSS files with accompanying variable lists and the full questionnaires (including routing/logic), enabling replication and cross-national comparison. The qualitative component comprises 30 semi-structured interviews with UK parents (collected February 2023-January 2024) and 22 interviews with Italian participants. The Italian interviews include two strands: interviews with moderators/administrators of parenting-focused Facebook groups (and one parent user) conducted in mid-2022, and interviews with Italian parents conducted December 2023-February 2024 using a revised guide to mirror the UK parent interviews. Across countries, interviews explore sharenting practices, attitudes to privacy and risk, strategies for controlling audiences and information flows, experiences of harm, and how norms are shaped within families and online communities. All transcripts are anonymised, and the Italian materials include both original-language transcripts and English translations, alongside documentation on recruitment, consent, and topic guides. Together, these four datasets enable comparative research on digital parenting practices, perceived and experienced risks to children, and the role of platforms and online communities in shaping what is shared about children and how parents attempt to keep them safe.

In 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 minors, 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. This project combined traditional and innovative cross-disciplinary approaches to explore these and other risks that “sharenting” poses to affected children. The 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 7 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).