Sharenting, liberdade de expressão e privacidade de crianças no ambiente digital: O papel dos provedores de aplicação no cenário jurídico brasileiro

Abstract

Parents use social networks to share their own life experiences (as a father or a mother) and sometimes they also share personal information about their children, such as photographs, location, the school they study, their friends network, health issues, among others. This practice, known as sharenting, creates a digital footprint that follows the child throughout his/her life, creates privacy issues and opposes parents' freedom of expression and children's personal data protection interests. The paper analyses this parental behaviour and the mechanisms to address such collision of norms under the Brazilian Internet Legal Framework (MCI) and jurisprudence. The article also examines the role of application providers, especially social networks and search engines, in the implementation of mechanisms to ensure children's right to be forgotten (to be exercised when they enter adult life) and to prevent the oversharing of information by their parents; in this particular issue, the Brazilian and European models are compared through a normative and jurisprudential analysis aiming to find elements to a legislative formulation for the Brazilian model that could ensure parents' freedom of expression as well as children's privacy. In the end, it is concluded that public policies targeting education about sharenting risks are needed, as well as the creation of a duty of care to providers in order to make them act preventively (improving the quality of information about the risks associated with sharenting) and correctively (implementing mechanisms to enforce the right to be forgotten).