Ireland’s Data Protection Commission urges parents to “pause before you post,” highlighting risks of sharing children’s data online. The campaign shifts focus from parental caution to platform accountability, stressing that tech companies must protect minors’ information, limit monetisation, and redesign systems that encourage oversharing. It’s a call for stronger digital responsibility and regulation.
The conversation around children’s privacy online has long been framed as a matter of parental caution—an individual responsibility governed by common sense and digital awareness. Parents have been urged for years to think twice before posting birthdays, school events, holiday moments, or everyday snippets of their children’s lives. But a new campaign by the Data Protection Commission (DPC) of Ireland reframes this debate entirely. Through a stark, attention-grabbing video titled “Pause Before You Post,” the DPC makes it clear that while parents play a role, the real burden of responsibility must fall on the platforms that monetise, store, circulate, and often profit from minors’ personal data. It is a crucial shift in narrative—one that exposes a deeper structural issue in the digital ecosystem.
The DPC’s message lands at a time when the concept of “sharenting”—parents sharing detailed content about their children online—has become both normalized and commercially encouraged. Many families see social media as a digital scrapbook, a place to document milestones and connect with extended networks. But what appears to be harmless sharing often results in significant amounts of personal information about children entering data pipelines that are far more complex and pervasive than most users realize. The DPC’s campaign underscores this reality: every photo, video, caption, or tag contributes to a data trail that can follow a child for years, sometimes even before they are old enough to understand what privacy means.
The video is simple, relatable, and unsettling in equal measure. It shows moments that any parent might post online—first steps, school achievements, funny faces, quiet afternoons. What jolts the viewer is the reminder that these intimate moments, once uploaded, no longer belong solely to the family. They become part of a global digital terrain where algorithms harvest every trace, companies profile users to build targeted advertising systems, and platforms store content indefinitely. The message is not designed to shame parents but to wake them up to a truth obscured by the everyday casualness of posting: the internet does not forget, and it rarely forgives.
Yet the DPC goes one step further, making a crucial distinction that often gets lost in public debates. The issue is not merely who posts children’s data—it is about the demand society must place on the online platforms themselves. These are the entities that monetise user-generated content, collect massive troves of behavioural data, and design engagement-driven environments that subtly encourage oversharing. The campaign challenges the assumption that privacy is only an individual responsibility. Instead, it insists that online service providers be held accountable for how they collect, retain, and use minors’ data.
Children have become an invisible currency in the digital economy. Their photos, preferences, routines, and online presence create valuable data points. While parents may think they are sharing content only with friends or relatives, algorithms see something else: information that can be analysed, categorized, and fed back into commercial pipelines. Even when platforms offer privacy settings, these do not fully shield data from internal analytics or future vulnerabilities. The DPC highlights that minors—the most vulnerable group of internet users—should not bear the consequences of data misuse simply because their parents posted content in good faith.
The campaign’s timing is significant. Across Europe, concerns about children’s digital rights have been mounting. Various countries have debated legislation regulating “sharenting,” while advocacy groups push for laws requiring platforms to redesign systems that inherently encourage excessive data sharing. Ireland, as home to many major tech companies’ European headquarters, plays an outsized role in shaping data protection standards across the continent. The DPC’s intervention is not just a public service announcement—it is part of a broader push to strengthen regulatory oversight and set new expectations for platform accountability.
The message also taps into a growing global discomfort with the surveillance-driven design of social platforms. Parents are increasingly concerned about how much technology companies know about their children: their faces, their routines, their preferences, their locations, even the metadata embedded in photos. The DPC argues that the burden must shift from individual vigilance to systemic safeguards. Platforms should be required to minimise data collection, restrict profiling, and build clearer, more responsible design frameworks. They should make privacy the default, not an optional setting buried under multiple layers of menus.
For many families, this conversation is long overdue. The idea of digital literacy—and digital responsibility—cannot fall solely on individuals navigating platforms built to maximise engagement, not safety. The DPC’s video acknowledges that sharing is often done with love, joy, and pride. But emotion cannot erase the risks inherent in a digital environment shaped by commercial imperatives. Children deserve a future not predetermined by data traces created before they even learn to speak. They deserve systems that protect their dignity, rights, and autonomy.
The DPC’s campaign ultimately calls for a societal recalibration. It is a reminder that protecting children’s privacy requires collective action—parents, regulators, policymakers, and most importantly, the platforms that have built billion-dollar economies on personal information. We must demand more from companies that invite families to share, celebrate, and archive their lives online. These platforms must be transparent about how children’s data is handled, must adhere to stringent safety standards, and must prioritize child protection over engagement metrics.
“Pause before you post” is a powerful message because it acknowledges both the personal and the structural aspects of digital privacy. It asks parents to think carefully, but it also invites society to demand safer digital environments. Children should not become data points before they even understand what data is. Their images should not be commodities. Their innocence should not be fuel for algorithms.
In the end, the campaign is not about stopping parents from sharing—it is about creating an ecosystem where sharing does not come with invisible consequences. It is about ensuring that the digital world grows more humane, more responsible, and more protective of those who cannot advocate for themselves. The DPC has sparked an important conversation, one that challenges us to rethink what it means to safeguard childhood in a connected age.
