When parents separate, they may spend considerable time agreeing on where their child will live, how holidays will work and who will make decisions about school. Social media may not come up until one parent posts a photograph that the other does not want online.
This can happen without either parent doing anything particularly unusual. One may have shared family photographs on Instagram for years and see no reason to stop after a separation. The other may simply believe their child's photographs should not be online.
The answer comes instead from the broader rules on parental authority and the child's privacy. Separation does not normally end joint parental authority, the legal responsibility parents have for making decisions about their child. Parents who share it remain responsible for those decisions even after they stop living together.
Luxembourg law recognises that not every decision requires both parents to act together, but the position becomes less clear once one parent has clearly objected. There is no provision specifically telling parents how posting a child's photograph on social media should be treated.
How the photographs are shared is likely to be relevant. An occasional picture on a private account used mainly by relatives and friends is different from regularly documenting a child's life on a public profile. Posts can also reveal information that is easy to overlook, such as the child's school, location or regular activities.
Luxembourg's data protection authority, the National Commission for Data Protection (CNPD), has published guidance covering children's image rights. For minors, decisions about publication will generally involve their legal representatives. The CNPD also recommends seeking the child's agreement once they are sufficiently mature to understand what it means to put a photograph online.
Not every family dispute about Instagram is necessarily a data protection case. The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) contains an exception for genuinely personal or household activities, which can cover private use of social media. Other rights concerning privacy and a person's image may still matter even when the GDPR itself does not settle the disagreement.
Children can also have quite definite views about what their parents post. A child who knows that school friends can see a photograph may care considerably more about it than a parent expects.
The CNPD does not set a fixed age for this. It says maturity should be considered individually, although its guidance refers to around 13 as a general reference point.
There is little Luxembourg guidance on what happens when two parents actually disagree about posting. Courts in the Netherlands have already encountered the problem, and the cases show how much can depend on the circumstances.
In 2018, a Dutch court dealt with parents who disagreed about the father's use of photographs and videos of their one-year-old daughter on Facebook and other social media. The court treated the issue as a disagreement about their shared responsibility for the child.
It ordered the father to remove a photograph already on Facebook and temporarily stopped him from posting further photographs on social media without the mother's consent. Private sharing through WhatsApp was not included in the prohibition.
The court accepted that the father wanted to share photographs of his daughter with friends and family. It considered that he could do that in other ways and found no benefit for a one-year-old child in having identifiable photographs placed on Facebook.
The same Dutch court considered another case in 2024, this time involving an eight-year-old. The mother had posted photographs and videos on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and WhatsApp, and the father wanted them removed.
The court said that parents sharing parental authority should decide together whether and how photographs of their child are posted. The child's wishes could also be considered.
It did not, however, order the broad removal the father wanted. The mother's accounts were private, most of the material consisted of ordinary family photographs, and the court considered that the parents should first try to agree on how they would handle social media.
Neither Dutch decision applies in Luxembourg. Their different outcomes are useful because they show why there may not be one answer for every family. The child's age, who can see the post, what the photograph reveals and what the parents have previously agreed can all be relevant.
France decided in 2024 to address the issue directly in its law. French law now expressly says that parents must protect their child's image rights together and involve the child according to their age and maturity. A family judge can intervene when the parents cannot agree.
Luxembourg has not yet adopted a comparable rule specifically dealing with parents posting photographs of their children. A parent here who objects should therefore start by making that objection clear and asking the other parent to discuss how photographs will be handled in future.
The solution may depend on what is actually causing the disagreement. Parents who are uncomfortable with public posts may still be happy for photographs to be shared privately with relatives. They can agree not to identify a school or location, or to check with each other before particular photographs are posted. Older children can be included in those discussions as well.
If the parents cannot resolve a serious disagreement, Luxembourg's family judge can deal with disputes about parental authority. There is currently no specific Luxembourg rule saying that an objection automatically requires every photograph to be removed, or that one parent is always free to continue posting despite the other's objection.
Social media has made this a fairly ordinary parenting issue, while Luxembourg still deals with it through rules that were not written specifically for Instagram, Facebook or TikTok. France has already changed its law, and Dutch courts have had to work through the problem using their existing rules on parental authority.
For separated parents in Luxembourg, it is worth discussing social media when they make the other arrangements concerning their child. What looks like an ordinary family photograph to a parent can remain online for years, and the child will be older and better able to judge what they would have preferred.
Matias Canibe is a lawyer based in Luxembourg, writing on privacy, technology and artificial intelligence.
