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a family has a picnic on the beach. one child is shown with only the back of their head visible; one child has a smiling emoji over their face
What’s in a face? Parents are concerned about sharing images of their child online. (Photo: Getty Images, additional design by Archi Banal)

InternetJuly 1, 2022

Will hiding their face protect your child online?

a family has a picnic on the beach. one child is shown with only the back of their head visible; one child has a smiling emoji over their face
What’s in a face? Parents are concerned about sharing images of their child online. (Photo: Getty Images, additional design by Archi Banal)

Information about a child can exist online before they even know what the internet is. Shanti Mathias talks to parents who conceal their children’s faces for privacy reasons.

Usha’s daughter was less than a week old when the requests from friends and family started coming in. She and her partner Sam “were both hounded with people asking ‘have you had your baby’,” the web developer says. While pregnant, the couple had decided not to post any pictures of their child online until she was old enough to make her own decisions about sharing her image. But Sam and Usha didn’t want to be fielding individual messages on top of caring for their new baby: it was more convenient to make a group announcement. They took a picture of themselves holding their daughter, carefully positioning her so only the back of her head was visible, and posted it on social media for their friends and family to see. 

Sam and Usha’s daughter is now nine months old, and they’ve only shared a few pictures of her on their Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok accounts, always taking care to make sure her face isn’t visible or concealing it with an emoji. They’ve asked their friends and family to do the same. “It’s important that our daughter gets to make her own decision about posting online, and at nine months, she obviously can’t do that,” says Usha. 

They’re not alone: big New Zealand celebrities like Dan and Honor Carter and TJ Perenara don’t post pictures of their kids’ faces. Overseas, celebrities and influencers like Chris Pratt and Kirsten Bell cover their children’s faces with emojis when sharing photos with their millions of followers.

The ethics of consent are tricky when it comes to sharing information about children, says Sean Lyons, the chief online safety officer at Netsafe. Major social media companies’ privacy policies are developed in response to laws in the US – although by conducting business in New Zealand, they’re still subject to the 2020 Privacy Act. These platforms have age limits set in the terms of service, delineating the age at which a child is expected to be able to make an informed decision about sharing personal information with the world’s biggest companies – usually around age 13. “You’re asking users to abide by an arbitrary number,” Lyons says. “You don’t turn 13 and get a degree in privacy.” 

But regardless of a child’s ability to make an informed decision about their digital footprint, many parents want to share information and pictures of their children, before and after they’ve turned 13. “Parents make decisions on behalf of their kids all the time,” says Lyons. “But young people grow up, and the information we share when they’re young doesn’t disappear.”

The kids are online, but are they alright? Photo: Getty Images

But why does the pressure to share photos of children online exist at all? “Sharing is natural,” notes Lyons, pointing out that in earlier generations photo albums might be kept in the living room to be shared with guests, filled with pictures of kids taking their first bath or winning cross country, all shown without the express permission or sometimes even presence of the child. Social media often feels like an extension of that living room, a place where social relationships are conducted through messages, calls and yes, sharing pictures. People are interested in each other, and interested in images of each other – thousands of years of art history demonstrates that as effectively as the urge to friend request an acquaintance on Facebook so you can look at pictures of them in other contexts. 

But compared to a photo album, where only one or two copies of a photo might exist, platforms like Facebook and Instagram change the mechanics of distribution. A photo of a child is held on remote servers, replicated onto the screens of anyone who scrolls past the post. There’s a difference, too, in the permanency: a new friend you meet at a festival would most likely never see the crinkled photo of your younger self that your dad keeps in his wallet, but it would be a matter of a few clicks to find that image if it was posted on a public profile. 

To Facebook and its ilk, it doesn’t matter what kind of content a user shares, just that the content is there – they profit from making their platforms an extension of users’ social lives, and encourage personal posts to build engagement. “The way that algorithms work, people are ‘rewarded’ when they post things that other people like,” says Lyons. Sam agrees. “I think people are seduced by the validation these platforms are designed to provide,” he says. Likes and comments appreciating the child you already love to pieces are especially validating, even if the child can’t understand how their image is being used for other people’s advantage. Sam has to consciously resist using his child’s image to seek this validation. 

You might be OK with sharing your selfie with your friends, but who else is seeing it? (Photo: Getty Images)

There are broader implications of megacorporations profiting from reams of data about children, usually posted in good faith by people who love their kids and want to share that with their communities. For many parents, though, it’s the risk to their individual children that is concerning. “I’ve read a lot of horror stories about how people’s photos are used, copied and pasted onto someone else’s phone, screenshotted and misappropriated,” says Sela Jane Hopgood, Pacific communities editor at The Spinoff, who has been active on social media since her early teens. Since her accounts are public, she doesn’t know who may hold images of her child – but she can at least conceal his face. 

While these concerns are valid, and Netsafe is working to help parents and caregivers mitigate the risk of people individually targeting children with predatory intent, Lyons points out that the harms can be broader. Images which create social embarrassment or lead to bullying from a child’s peers, even if the intent of the adult sharing the image is positive, can hurt too.  

Individuals like Hopgood, Sam and Usha choosing to hide their children’s faces are in the minority. Social media isn’t designed to make individuals thoughtful about their own privacy – it’s not even set up to encourage us to read the terms and conditions. Changes to the mechanics of the platforms could help; Hopgood suggests a “are you sure you want to post a picture of a minor” prompt when facial recognition detects a child, similar to the Twitter function that asks people to read an article before they retweet it. 

But large tech platforms profiting from the norms around posting pictures will likely be slow to instate these functions unless regulation asks them too. In the meantime, Lyons says that in the inevitably digital world the best thing parents can do is model thoughtful behaviour to their own children. If you’re thinking about sharing a photo online “don’t just ask your kids – be seen to be asking your friends or your partner if they’re OK with it,” he says. “That’s such an important part of developing healthy boundaries in online life for our children.”

* Sam and Usha asked not to include their last names to protect their privacy


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a virtual reality version of graffiti with the background of a real photo of a carpark/tunnel thing
Berst finds a place for graffiti in the metaverse (Image: supplied, Additional design: Archi Banal)

InternetJune 23, 2022

Can virtual reality graffiti make the metaverse cool?

a virtual reality version of graffiti with the background of a real photo of a carpark/tunnel thing
Berst finds a place for graffiti in the metaverse (Image: supplied, Additional design: Archi Banal)

Graffiti is an art form traditionally anchored in physical, urban space – but does it have to be? Shanti Mathias talks to an artist taking his work to the metaverse.

I have found the metaverse, and the metaverse is in Epsom. In the small downstairs room of a house on a leafy avenue near Auckland’s Cornwall Park, artist Bobby Hung is guiding me through his artwork in Kingspray, a virtual reality app designed to create a realistic experience of graffiti. 

“Push the button that’s flush with the controller,” says Hung, who is a patient man; I’ve been blundering around his tagged-up landscape of urban decay for at least 10 minutes, and I’m lost. It’s disorienting, wearing a VR headset, looking at my disembodied hands clutch cans of spray paint, and knowing that at the same time I am stumbling around someone else’s spare room. I try to relax into the metaverse and stop thinking about my body, ignoring the yips of Hung’s dog (adorable, tiny, named “Latte”).

I manage to spray some virtual paint on a virtual wall, next to one of Hung’s more elaborate artworks. The wall features bold lettering, his tag – “Berst” – in elaborate letters. I do a little squiggle, then lean closer, trying to outline the shape with black. I finish my “artwork” – it dignifies my visual ability too much to even call it that – and continue to follow Hung’s instructions to take a picture of my scribbling and send it to Facebook.

Some random red and black squiggles on a fake subway car. it looks bad!
This is why journalists should only be allowed to spraypaint in the metaverse (Image: Supplied)

Facebook, really, is why we’re here; since rebranding as Meta, the company has been desperate to show what a metaverse is and why it might be useful. It’s a difficult proposition, given that much of what is promised about the metaverse – a digital world seamlessly integrated with the real one – is based on the enthusiastic proclamations of tech billionaires who have everything to gain from the internet being further incorporated into our lives. To support the proposition that the metaverse is a good idea, Meta has released an app that lets your avatar stroll around a virtual world (albeit without legs), Microsoft is working on an app that will let your Teams meeting take place in virtual reality, and many many many companies have promised that metaverse technologies will change digital art.  

I’m talking to Hung at the behest of a PR company which is working with Meta. They’ve given him a Quest 2 VR headset from Oculus, also a Meta company, and they’ve given me the opportunity to talk to him and try it out, hoping, presumably, to work on that public buy-in factor, to show more people why Meta’s future digital world will be transformative. 

Hung, a longtime graffiti artist who does commercial design work as well as teaching and researching at Unitec, is enthusiastic about using a virtual reality app for graffiti. He’s passionate about the art form, and walks me through a brief history of graffiti and what “post graffiti” might look like as artists take their practice into traditional fine art and commercial spaces. 

From a graffiti artist’s perspective there are lots of reasons why working virtually is an advantage. Hung lists them for me: it makes it possible to collaborate with artists overseas. It makes it easier to document graffiti, lending permanence to an ephemeral form. It allows artists to plan and practise large-scale projects. And, importantly, it’s not illegal. 

Bobby Hung, wearing a black cap and jacket, ads the finishing touches to a blue and yellow mural
Bobby Hung is an accomplished artist in the real world and the digital one. (Image: Supplied)

Hung is particularly passionate about the ways that digital graffiti can make the artform more accessible. “I started tagging when I was 17,” he says. The cost of a can of spray paint, around $10, is a lot for a young person with no source of income. While an Oculus Quest headset is about $700, publicly available units – at schools, say, or libraries – could make practising graffiti more accessible, as well as letting artists see work from around the world. 

From an environmental point of view, digital graffiti is less wasteful – no empty aluminium cans abandoned beneath colourful paintings, no health hazards from paint fumes. “I could paint a 10-storey wall without burning through hundreds of paint cans,” Hung says. 

On these practical considerations, digital graffiti has a lot going for it. But graffiti is an art form designed to interact with physical space; what does it mean to translate site specific artworks to a digital landscape? 

“Digital graffiti will never replace graffiti, just like digital painting will never replace oil painting,” says Hung. There’s a spontaneity to real-world art – you may never know who sees a piece of art you’ve tucked at the entrance to a train tunnel, or what happened to a tag left in a building slated for demolition. But making art with others epitomises the nearly-realised possibilities of the metaverse to come, Hung says: if the technology takes off, there will be a way to connect with other artists beyond the superficiality of mutual follows.

bobby hung wears a VR headset in a hallway lined with pieces of art
Bobby Hung is used to making art in different spaces with different commercial realities (Photo: Shanti Mathias)

There’s also profit to be made. They may simulate the real world, but unlike the real world, metaverses are being built by corporations with commodification built in right from the start. Even if Meta keeps its metaverse open, it wouldn’t have invested $10 billion (so far) in the enterprise if there wasn’t money to be extracted from games, hardware, digital “skins”, and in-world commerce. NFTs epitomise this, turning works of art into inherent commodities with encryption embedding their ability to be traded again and again.

To Hung, this isn’t a problem. “It’s impossible to live in a world that’s free of capitalism,” he says: he’s comfortable teaching at Unitec, selling books, painting commercial murals, making documentaries, gathering oral histories about graffiti in New Zealand, and still tagging where and when he wants, for free. While Hung hasn’t ventured into NFTs himself (yet), he’s had friends who have made money from selling their collections. “The system of the art market is quite flawed,” he says. “You should be able to determine what your value is, not a gallery.” 

Graffiti is just one of many art forms reckoning with digital possibilities. Sotheby’s – the world famous art auction house – has launched a metaverse for its NFTs. Locally, Glorious intends to do the same for New Zealand art. While many NFT projects are dodgy shitshows producing art destined to become a very average profile picture, other projects help artists get paid and enrich physical space

a colourful tag on a brick wall from the Kingspray game. It's relatively realistic, but the sky isn't quite the right colour; the scene is a little empty and desolate
Berst’s vibrant art decorates a wall in virtual reality app Kingspray. (Image: Supplied)

While the smooth rendering of the VR graffiti app is realistic enough to be disorienting, it’s also eerie. Kingspray uses the aesthetics of a post-industrial Western city – brick walls, desolate rooftops, subway stations where the trains aren’t running. As immersive as it is, the app also feels generic, nowhere-in-particular: the streets do not have names, the buildings are not owned by developers I resent. There are no people: it’s just me and my digital hands, alone in a fake metropolis. In the emptiness, the graffiti tags are a reminder that other people have been to this universe of pixels before I got here, that even in the metaverse, people want to make their mark. 

“Imagine no limitation to space,” Hung says dreamily; space, after all, is the graffiti artist’s currency. “You could tag the Empire State Building with ‘Berst’,” pipes up Robert, the PR representative. But this game is not set in a city with recognisable landmarks. The aesthetics of graffiti – brash lettering inviting you to think about urban space differently – translates well to the virtual world, but in doing so, it loses some of the specificity that makes the art form unique.

Virtual reality, NFTs, social media companies reinventing themselves as they rapidly lose market share in the crucial youth sector: is the nascent concept of the metaverse enough to unite these disparate digital trends? While the Kingspray graffiti app is excellent technology and fun to use, it’s not exactly the metaverse that Mark Zuckerberg has promised, where you can feel “like you’re right there with people, no matter how far apart you actually are.” 

In our interview, Hung describes the metaverse as “interesting”, over and over again. He’s not wrong: it’s interesting that the visual aesthetics of graffiti can be recreated so faithfully in virtual reality. A global public art gallery that anyone could contribute to would be interesting. The idea of digital simulation so realistic that you feel like you’re with someone even when they’re very far away: interesting. “There are so many possibilities,” says Hung, whose art exists in physical space while he thinks about graffiti on digital street corners. Hung is embracing these possibilities: who else will don the headset, buy the app, and explore them?  

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