Online Communication Between Parents: Violates the Privacy of Their Children

Today’s parents share upraising their child in social networking websites. This is a normal and routine activity of new parents in digital age. However, concerns raises when mothers and fathers excessively share personal information about their kids through online communication that invade their child privacy. Nowadays, children were born not only in real world but in virtual space as well. For instance it is common to see ultrasound picture of babies on Instagram posted by parents. That is to say, they would have digital presences and digital identity even before they were born.

In that way, Facebook has become a “modern-day baby book”, where children are becoming micro-celebrities in their communities. This kind of behaviour is know as “Sharenting”.

The C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health (2015) popularized this term which refers to “the practice of a parent to regularly use the social media to communicate a lot of detailed information about their child” (Sharenting, as cited in: Collins Dictionary).

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Sharenting might happen due to various reasons and motivations such ass self-representation, social web gratification or gaining social capital. The emphasis of current study is on Iranian community of parent on Instagram. We chose Instagram as a platform of study because a) most of popular SNS like Facebook, Youtube are blocked in Iran since post-election protests in 2009, b) Instagram as a photo-sharing SNS create many potentials for revealing personal information. According to IWS there are 56,700,000 Internet users in Dec/2017 in Iran.

It consists 69.1% of the population.

Iran has its own complicated relationship with social media platforms. Instagram is the only popular social media platform that is not blocked in the country. A recent report conducted by Iran’s Ministry of Youth and Sports, shows that 67.4% of the Iranian youth use the internet. Currently, there are no concrete statistics regarding Instagram’s users in Iran, but if we take a look at the number of Instagram’s downloads on Cafe Bazaar ,the most popular Iranian Android market, we would find out that there are more than 16 million downloads. Considering that there are many downloads from Google Play and the fact that there are 6 million to 7 million iPhones in the country (which most likely have Instagram installed), there should be more than 20M Instagram users inside the country. This makes 2.85% of Instagram’s users Iranians.

Purpose of the Study

To fill the gap in literature, this research is an effort to examine the importance of protecting children’s informational privacy on social media. Particularly, main purpose of current study is to understand how online privacy literacy of parents can effect their concern and online behavior toward their child/children's online privacy. All in all, Big Data tools creates a greater level of complexity and urgency. The purpose of this article is to initiate a discussion in the one relatively impartial venue that remains, higher education . Lastly, this study aims to extend the literature on Instagram privacy concern and also bridge the gap about parents oversharing behaviors in online arena. Extent literature specifically on Iran community becaoyse vast majority of literature investigate privacy issue only on western society so that there is a lack od empirically study that addresses the.