The Bots & The Bees: Sharenting in the age of AI

This isn’t a guilt trip. Sharenting (sharing photos of your children online) is normal, and for most families those pictures aren’t going anywhere. But research conducted for the 2026 edition of Norton Insights Report: Connected Kids surfaced something worth pausing on: 27% of Australian parents surveyed had shared a photo showing their child’s face online before their first birthday, and 57% had shared one before their child was six. Only 26% said they’ve never posted a photo of their child at all.

Those photos may have gone up years before “AI-generated fake image” was a phrase any parent needed to know. And they may still be there now. Unfortunately, what can be done with those pictures has changed.

Parents are rethinking what they’ve shared

In Australia, 76% of parents say they worry AI could be used to create fake images or conversations involving their child. And 77% are concerned that photos or information shared of their child online could affect them negatively in the future. The concern is clear, but for many parents, it emerged only after years of sharing.

That’s less a contradiction than a sign that times have changed. Sharing a baby photo in 2020 or 2022 wasn’t a risky call by the standards of the time. It’s the standards that moved.

What AI changes about sharenting

Criminals can use AI-generated photos or fake identities to gain a young person’s trust or manipulate them into sharing real images, which can then be used for financial sextortion.

Last year, the US National Center for Missing & Exploited Children received more than 100 reports of financial sextortion targeting children and teens per day, on average. Victims skew heavily toward teenage boys, and many cases start on social media, gaming platforms, or messaging apps. Victims skew heavily toward teenage boys, and many cases start on social media, gaming platforms, or messaging apps.

Publicly available childhood photos are also raw material for AI image generation more broadly, not just in targeted sextortion cases. Once a clear face is public, there’s no way to fully control where an image ends up.

“Parents have spent years teaching children how to recognize strangers online, but AI changes the nature of what ‘danger’ online looks like,” said Leyla Bilge, Norton’s Global Head of Scam Research. “From the misuse and alteration of posted or shared photos to AI bots impersonating trusted sources, there are entirely new risks at play, and that means parents need to update how they talk about online safety, and how they think about what’s already out there.”

Sharenting is a parenting decision, not just a posting decision, and it deserves the same consideration as other choices about your child. Before sharing, ask whether you’d be comfortable with a stranger seeing that specific photo and caption. If your answer changes when you picture a stranger instead of a grandparent, it may be worth reconsidering the post or limiting who can see it.

Four privacy checks worth making now

You don’t need to delete your kid’s entire digital history. A few checks cover most of the gap:

• Look at your own posting history with fresh eyes: Scroll back through the last year of photos you’ve posted. Would you post the same ones today, knowing what you know now? There’s no right answer here, just an audit most parents haven’t done yet.
• Check who can see what you post: Privacy settings drift. A photo posted to “friends only” in 2021 may be visible more broadly today if an account went public, a platform changed its defaults, or a friend list grew to include people you don’t really know.
• Think about identifying details, not just faces: A photo that shows a school uniform, a house number, or a recognisable location tells a stranger more than you might think. Crop or skip those where you can.
• Loop in the rest of the family: Grandparents, aunts, uncles, and family friends who post photos of your kids are part of your child’s footprint too. A quick, low-key “hey, mind keeping those to our family group chat” goes a long way.

Online protection goes beyond what you share

Reviewing your own posts is a useful first step, but your child’s online safety also depends on the messages, accounts, and content they encounter themselves. Norton 360 with AI-Powered Scam Detection, can help flag suspicious interactions in real time, and Norton Family gives you visibility into your child’s own online activity as they get old enough to post for themselves.

Methodology note

*The 2026 Connected Kids study was commissioned by Gen (the company behind Norton) and conducted online by Dynata across 12 markets from 22 May to 19 June 2026. It included 1,000 Australian adults. Data is weighted by age, gender, and region to be nationally representative. Mentions of parents refer to parents of children under 18 years of age, accounting for 39% of adults surveyed across all markets. Data in this blog post refers to Australian respondents only.