Emerging Norms and Privacy Implications of Parental Online Sharing: The Perspective of the STFU, Parents Blog

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Abstract

Many parents share information about their children online. This offers benefits, such as social support, but it can also raise privacy concerns. The popular blog STFU, Parents contains a repository of cases of parental online sharing on Facebook. Through a qualitative analysis of posts from the blog, this study explores the norms that STFU, Parents advocates to govern parental online sharing and the reasons parents should follow them. It considers these emergent norms through the framework of contextual integrity and explains how these norms can help us better understand the privacy implications of parental online sharing. The findings suggest that parents should exhibit a sanitized view of parenting, largely through humor. From a contextual integrity perspective, the norms overemphasize the role of the audience and underemphasize that of the child. In addition, they show that parental online sharing can result in information flowing into different contexts than people may expect.

Author

• Priya Kumar, University of Maryland College of Information Studies