Canon Lifecake platform for sharing family photos

Lifecake, the cloud platform from Canon with which parents can share photos and videos of their children with other family members in total privacy and security, has surpassed 2 million users and 120 million uploads, with over a billion views. This success is not accidental, and its popularity goes hand in hand with the growing concern about privacy management on traditional social media.

Since 2015, the year of the acquisition of Lifecake by Canon, highly targeted activities have been developed to grow the application in Italy, leading our country to hold the second position globally for the number of users. Lifecake helps people relive their children’s important life moments, from birth to every stage of growth, and Canon looked to the world of Lifecake to take another step towards technological innovation to help people best preserve the most important moments of their lives. Canon’s mission is to play a role in every image taken, regardless of the device used, to bring to life the photographs each of us takes.

According to a study conducted by Nominet and Parent Zone on 2,000 British parents, the average parent “lacks basic privacy knowledge” and shares nearly 1,500 photos of their children under five on social media. In Italy, the regulation for the protection of minors contained in the EU regulation of April 27, 2016, will come into force on May 25, 2018, according to which

the photographic image of children constitutes personal data.

In this context, using platforms that respect the privacy of minors becomes fundamental.

Sharenting is born from the combination of parenting and sharing, a term that indicates the widespread tendency of parents to share everything concerning their children on the web: from the moment of birth to the first feeding, from the first smile to the first words, from the first steps to the first birthday, and so on.

The platform’s popularity clearly shows parents’ distrust of the public internet: some cite poor privacy, while others want to keep intimate moments away from the large audience of social media.

“Parents take hundreds of photos to document the joys of childhood,” said Lifecake co-founder Ed Botterill. “But concerns are not lacking: who is the body responsible for checking who can access images posted on public social media profiles? And who owns the uploaded content? Lifecake provides a secure, private, and privacy-compliant answer. Only families and close friends invited by the parents can access the photos, no one else.”