The Relationship Between Mother’s Safety Competency and The Risk Perception in Sharenting Activities

Abstract

Social media has attracted many groups of society to use it for various goals. Some parents use it as digital gallery for their children’s photographs, which is now becomes common digital activity in Instagram. In the midst of Instagram popularity, there is risk, lurks children’s safety. The risk includes misuse of children’s images or even kidnapping threat. The activity of sharing online information about children by parents is known as ‘sharenting’, which is mostly practiced by mothers. By practicing ‘sharenting’, they might violate children’s privacy rights. To avoid this, parents' digital literacy skill is needed. Parents’ digital literacy may affect their skill in using digital media, including safety competency. Thus, this research aims to measure the relationship between mother’s safety competencies and risk perception of children’s privacy in ‘sharenting’ activities. The method for this research is web survey, using questionnaire to collect the data from 385 mothers who have children under 13 years old, in accordance with Instagram’s age restriction policy, who live in East Java. The results show that the safety competency factor only correlates 14.4% with the mothers' risk perceptions of children's privacy. Another factor of 85.6% is not seen in this study. The weak relation between mothers’ safety competency and their risk perception of child’s privacy in this research shows that there are many other factors that can be explored in the future research.