By: Scott Harris
Who Controls a Child’s Digital Identity in the Age of AI?
As a member of our local Little League board, I’ve been pulled into more than one parent complaint about people photographing games. Those conversations taught me two things. First, how passionate some parents are about this. I heard a few horror stories about why it mattered so much to them, and after hearing them I understood. Second, how hard it is to actually fix. There are rules about public spaces. There are the rights of the other team’s families, and of the other parents on your own team who want pictures of their kids. Put all of that together and there are enough loopholes that even the most careful parent can end up with their child photographed and posted by someone they’ve never met.
Our family has had its own lessons on the other side of this. My youngest son runs a small business that sells mostly through social media, so we’ve had to learn the rules about what a young person can post, and we’ve seen firsthand how wild some of the replies can get.
All of that is why children matter so much in the Digital Persona Rights conversation. Today’s kids are the first generation whose digital identity can start before they’re old enough to use the internet, sometimes before they’re born, and it keeps growing long before they understand what a digital footprint is.
A digital identity that starts at birth
For many families, sharing photos and videos of kids online is just part of life: the newborn in the hospital, birthdays and holidays, school events, games, vacations, and plenty of ordinary days in between. There’s a name for it, “sharenting,” and it’s now deeply woven into modern parenting. Pew Research has documented how common it is for parents to share content about their kids online, usually to stay connected with friends and family (see Pew’s report Parenting Children in the Age of Screens). Child advocates have also raised concerns about how early digital footprints shape a child’s privacy later on, including UNICEF in its paper Privacy, Protection of Personal Information and Reputation Rights.
Most of this sharing is harmless and well-intended. But what used to be a photo album on a bookshelf can now become a permanent, searchable record.
A footprint before consent
A core idea behind Digital Persona Rights is that people should have meaningful control over how their identity is used. Children rarely get that chance. By the time they’re old enough to understand privacy, much of their childhood may already be online, shared by parents, relatives, schools, teams, and social networks.
For earlier generations, childhood memories lived in albums, home videos, and scrapbooks, where access was limited and private. Today’s kids may have their milestones, struggles, and everyday moments posted in real time and accessible for decades. There’s no single legal precedent for this yet, but privacy law, especially in Europe, is starting to recognize that people should eventually have stronger rights over data collected during childhood. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation already adds protections for minors’ data (European Commission – Data Protection Overview).
The result is that a big part of a child’s digital identity can be built before they’ve ever had a chance to shape it themselves.
The AI dimension
AI adds a whole new layer. Modern AI systems are trained on huge datasets collected from across the internet, which can include publicly available photos and videos of children. Those images can end up helping systems that recognize faces, generate synthetic people, model expressions, analyze behavior, and predict how people interact, usually without anyone’s knowledge or permission. Regulators have noticed. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has raised concerns about how children’s data is collected and used in commercial systems (FTC – Children’s Privacy).
For adults, this already raises hard questions. For kids, it’s more serious, because a digital identity created in childhood could feed AI systems decades from now in ways nobody imagined when the photos were posted. This isn’t just about privacy anymore. It’s about how a person’s identity may be used, analyzed, and copied in the future.
The child who never agreed
A newborn can’t decide whether their photo goes online, a toddler can’t set privacy controls, and a young child can’t understand how AI might use their pictures twenty years from now. Yet they’re the ones who will live with those decisions. By adulthood, thousands of images, videos, comments, and stories about them may already exist across social media, cloud archives, and search engines.
Courts and regulators are starting to recognize long-term digital privacy rights, including the broader “right to be forgotten” established by the Court of Justice of the European Union (Court of Justice of the European Union – Case Law). It isn’t specific to parents posting about their kids, but it reflects a shift toward giving people more control over how their personal history lives on online.
That creates a real tension between parents’ rights and a child’s future autonomy, and current law only partly addresses it. Parents nearly always share with good intentions, but the long-term consequences belong to the child, not the parent.
What a lifetime of data can add up to
We don’t yet know the long-term effects of growing up online. A child whose life is widely shared may one day discover that big parts of it are sitting in permanent archives, and future AI could combine years of that data into a remarkably detailed profile: how their face changed over time, their behavior, their voice, how they communicate, their personality, what they buy, and who they know. Even if that’s used for good purposes, the person most affected never got to decide whether the data should exist in the first place.
A different kind of privacy question
Traditional privacy law mostly protects things like financial records, medical information, and government ID numbers. Digital Persona Rights point to something broader: identity itself may need protection. For children, that raises questions like these:
- Should kids be able to remove content about them once they become adults?
- Should images of minors get special treatment in AI training data?
- Should people be able to reclaim control of childhood data shared without their consent?
- Should AI systems face extra limits when using content involving children?
- Should platforms have to be more transparent about how children’s information is used?
Those conversations are just starting in legal and policy circles, and some advocates are already pushing for answers: expanded rights to remove childhood content, tighter limits on AI training data involving minors, stronger consent requirements, identity protections that carry into adulthood, and ways for adults to reclaim what was shared about them as kids. The UK has already moved in this direction with stronger protections for children’s data, most notably through the ICO’s Children’s Code.
Balancing family sharing and future rights
None of this means parents should stop sharing pictures of their kids. Family memories matter, and these platforms help people stay close. As awareness grows, though, I think more families will pause before they post. Small steps help: limiting who can see posts, leaving out unnecessary personal details and locations, and being choosy about what goes up. The goal isn’t to stop sharing. It’s to recognize that a digital identity now starts earlier than ever, and that small choices today can last for decades.
The next generation of digital rights
Every generation faces its own questions about privacy and technology. For my parents, it was television and the telephone. For mine, it was the internet. For today’s kids, it may be something bigger: owning a digital identity that started forming before they could talk.
AI has turned personal data into something far more powerful than information. Images, video, voice recordings, and behavior can now be analyzed, copied, and used to generate increasingly realistic versions of real people. If we decide that people deserve control over how their identities are used, children may deserve the strongest protection of all. Nobody should have to spend their life trying to take back an identity they never had the chance to create.
I think about the parents at those Little League games, and about my son navigating what he can and can’t post. They’re all working through the same question in their own way: who gets to decide how a child is seen? For the first time in history, a person’s digital persona can start forming long before they understand what it means to have one. How we answer that question may become one of the defining digital rights challenges of the AI era.
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