‘Sharenting’ is problematic. This app gives parents an alternative way to post about their kids
By Sarah Bregel
While tweens and teens are using social media more than ever, their online presence often begins before they can even say “TikTok.” Many parents begin sharing information about their children as soon as they have their first sonogram photo taken, and it doesn’t stop there. By the time kids are 18, an average of 70,000 pieces of information about them are available online.
We’d love to think our “sharenting” culture is without consequence, but that’s not entirely true. For example, social-media sharing leads to an enormous amount of fraud. According to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), more than 95,000 people reported about $770 million in losses from fraud cases linked to social media in 2021 alone. The security experts at Barclays say two-thirds of identity fraud cases affecting people over 18 will be a result of not their own social media usage, but of things their parents shared about them.
That’s a pretty good reason not to post charming anecdotes about our kids. But for many parents, sharing feels like a quick and efficient way to keep friends and family in the loop, making it fairly tough to quit cold turkey.
Enter Footprint, a newly launched sharing platform that feels surprisingly like posting on social media, except that users share with only a small group of up to 36 people. Proud moms and pops can post photos, thoughts, and memories with the click of a button. They still get the thrill of a quick share, and the dopamine dose to go alone with it, but without the worry about where the information might end up.
Founder Nate Fish, a former professional baseball player and Olympian, says that’s precisely the point. He started the app after first creating email accounts for his niece and nephew when they were born as a safe way to keep track of photos, videos, and messages that they could enjoy forever. When he realized that more than 90% of families were doing something similar, he wanted to provide a better option that felt more like a community.
“We still want people to have the satisfaction of sharing their kids’ content because they’re proud of them,” he told Fast Company. “We just want them to share with a caring group of friends and family instead of random people.”
Fish says that because the app was specifically designed for parental sharing, with features that make sharing more engaging, it’s favorable to posting on social media.
There are plenty of valid concerns about social-media sharing. But perhaps most impactful is that kids don’t actually want their parents sharing about them once they reach a certain age. (If you’ve ever had a newly minted teenager demand that you remove a photo you’ve posted without their consent—then weed through your entire Instagram, flagging photos they want you to remove—you know what I’m talking about.) Fish says kids deserve autonomy over their online footprint and that the app gives it back to them.
“The point is, we are allowing them to make those decisions themselves and are giving them agency over how they use or don’t use social media.”
Right now, our kids’ entire lives are documented, and that likely won’t change any time soon. But the debate over online privacy is heating up. With some parents realizing that kid-focused content has the power to earn them thousands of followers, campaigns like Quit Clicking Kids, which aims to protect child influencers from parents who exploit them, are starting to emerge. With that in mind, Footprint comes at a pivotal time. And it could be a hit because it steers away from posting for personal gain while not asking us to change anything about how we share information—just who sees it.
The app is currently free to download, even the premium version, and it’s ad-free. It will cost $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year starting July 1, when the promotion ends.
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