The child asks for their childhood¶

Research brief, The Morporkian Civil Liberties Union (MCLU). Open file.

A child turns eighteen and asks for everything that is held about them. What comes back starts before they were born.

A pregnancy tracked week by week. A monitor that listened in the nursery. Developmental milestones entered by a tired parent at eleven at night. Photographs stored by the thousand, school platforms, health records, and a name that was searchable before it was spoken aloud.

None of it was theirs to agree to. Much of it is also somebody else’s: their mother’s pregnancy, their brother in the same photograph, another child at the same party whose parents were never asked.

The parent did nothing but use ordinary services for ordinary reasons, most of them out of love.

• What in a childhood archive belongs to the person it is about, and what belongs to whoever made it?

• If a subject existed as data before they could consent to anything, when does the consent get asked for?

Whether a child can take it back¶

• Extraction-by-design, Pybus, Matheson and Lachmansingh, on baby-tracking apps and what runs from launch.

• GDPR Article 8 and the age of consent for information services, which varies by member state.

• Whether any authority has addressed sharenting, and what remedy it offered the child.

• What the baby-tracking and family-photo services do when a subject who is not the account holder asks for erasure at majority.

• School platforms: retention periods after a pupil leaves, and who can ask for what.

Last updated: 17 September 2026