Bologna, 24 April 2024 – About sixty Of photos of children who smile at the sea, on a bench with friends, on bikes, in the park while playing, located in the places with the greatest influx of Bologna: the railway station, the Torre degli Asinelli, via Rizzoli, the Montagnola, Palazzo Albergati, the small window on the Moline canal in via Piella, the university faculties, the headquarters of the Red Cross.
Anyone who sees them stops amazedintrigued, sometimes irritated: just turn the frame and read ‘Would you put your child on the street?’ and frame the QR code to understand. Starting from the fact that the images of the boys and girls are not real, but fruit of artificial intelligence.
The initiative is called Private frames and it is a sort of ‘guerrilla marketing’ against sharenting, that phenomenon born with the advent of social media and the consequent desire to appear, which leads many parents to indiscriminately share photos and information of their children on online platforms, without consider the risks to the privacy and safety of minors, as well as leaving a permanent digital trace that could influence their future lives.
The initiative is by a group of students from the European Institute of Design in Rome: Costanza Nastri, Giorgia Michelangeli, Francesca Verini, Giorgia Parisi, Daniele Stecconi.
AND Constance Ribbons, 22 years old, nephew of Enzo Tortora who, like the other young people in the group, is about to graduate in Communication Design, to explain how the idea was born and what the future paths will be. “It begins with the perspective of a university project at the IED and the theme we have chosen is that of photos of minors published online by their parents: we want to raise families’ awareness of the dangers and consequences of excessive exposure of content regarding their children on social media – he explains –. The message we want to send with these framed images placed in places where many people pass by is to say: exposing your children online without any protection is how to put them alone on the street”. As Costanza and his companions explain, the fact that minors seem so real is precisely because AI processes that gigantic amount of data that the parents themselves put online. Network not always benevolent. The fact that the photographs were then framed is to reiterate the concept that such intimate images were deprived of the protective frame represented by the walls of the house.
The initiative it left on 10 April from Rome. The photos, about seventy, were exhibited in different areas of the Testaccio and Eur districts. Last Monday they arrived in Bologna. “City chosen because it is full of young people who must, in turn, be made aware of the dangers of excessive and uncontrolled exposure on social media”, says Nastri.
The reactions to seeing the photos on streets and squares? “We stopped to observe them and we must say that they were varied: some were embarrassed, curious, annoyed, but all those who then took the photos and understood, even talking to us who were there, gave us great support and encouraged us to continue this initiative throughout Italy – continues the student –. Now we are thinking about which part of the country to continue in, whether to go north or south. We must be right about this, but we will decide soon because we don’t want a lot of time to pass between the various stages After Rome and Bologna, we intend to continue because the support, even from the people of Bologna, has been truly great”.
Tags: photo children street warning parents expose social media
