Who owns your child’s image?

On Monday, a bill was passed by the National Assembly in France that will give courts the power to prevent parents posting pictures or videos of their kids online. The courts will decide, based on the child’s age and maturity, if the consent of both parents is needed, or whether the child’s approval is sufficient. In certain circumstances, if posting the image ‘seriously affects the child’s dignity or moral integrity’, not even the consent of both parents will be enough. The proposer of the bill, Bruno Studer, says the new law is intended to show young people that their parents don’t have an ‘absolute right’ over their image.

I feel ambivalent about this. On the one hand, it’s an example of the state appropriating responsibilities that should properly belong to parents and, in that way, undermining the authority that parents should enjoy over their children. It’s not quite as bad as the SNP’s ‘named person’ scheme, which would have seen the Scottish government make a teacher or health visitor responsible for the welfare of every child – it was abandoned in 2016 after the Supreme Court ruled it would have breached human rights law – but not a million miles away.