(LifeSiteNews) – A powerful new Irish advertisement is circulating to illustrate the dangers of children sharing personal information on social media.
The 40-second spot follows a mother, father, and little girl walking through a shopping mall together. Along the way, various adult strangers passing by greet the child by name, revealing that they know various details of her life, such as that she recently had a birthday and indicating that they witnessed events to which they were not invited, such as birthday party and football game.
The greetings are superficially friendly and innocuous, but dread steadily builds over how they know any of this in the first place, with the most disturbing being a man who quips, “hope your dad picks you up on time for once!” The information is ultimately revealed to have been accessed through social media posts.
Every time you share their life online, you risk sharing their personal data with the world. Pause before you post. pic.twitter.com/dN5qRfWkv5
— Data Protection Commission Ireland (@DPCIreland) November 24, 2025
“Every time you share their life online, you risk sharing their personal data with the world,” the narrator warns. “Pause before you post.”
The ad was the work of the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), a supervisory body “responsible for monitoring the application of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and we also have functions and powers related to other regulatory frameworks, including the Irish ePrivacy Regulations (2011) and the (European Union) Directive known as the Law Enforcement Directive (LED).”
Children’s safety online is a longstanding topic of concern, exacerbated by allegations that the companies behind the world’s largest social networks don’t take security seriously even when vulnerabilities are brought to their attention.
As LifeSiteNews recently covered, more than 1,800 plaintiffs are currently suing Google-owned YouTube, Meta-owned Instagram, Snapchat, and China-linked TikTok for “relentlessly pursu(ing) a strategy of growth at all costs, recklessly ignoring the impact of their products on children’s mental and physical health.” A recently unsealed filing in the case alleges that Meta actually had a policy of not suspending users for attempted prostitution and sexual solicitation until the 17th offense, which the company (which also owns Facebook) denies.
Last year, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal also reported on evidence that Meta was aware that its subscription tools were being used to facilitate child sexual exploitation but neglected to solve the issue, specifically 2023 warnings from safety staffers to superiors about paid subscription tools being used by hundreds of “parent-managed minor accounts” to sell adult male users’ images of their own young daughters wearing swimsuits and leotards.
The photos themselves were not sexual, nude, or otherwise illegal, but many customers made perfectly clear to the mothers running the accounts that they were deriving sexual enjoyment from them. “Sometimes parents engaged in sexual banter about their own children or had their daughters interact with subscribers’ sexual messages,” the Journal reported. “Meta’s recommendation systems were actively promoting such underage modeling accounts to users suspected of behaving inappropriately online toward children.”
The Times added that Instagram users who reported sexually explicit images and suspected predators were “typically met with silence or indifference,” and even if they used the block function on “many” of them they were actually penalized with limits on their own access to certain features.
For years, tech giant Apple has also faced allegations that, despite its public assurances to the contrary, it could indeed personally identify users from iPhone App Store data, discerning individual iCloud accounts and by extension the name, email address, and data associated with them.
