Invisible Exploitation in Digital Childhoods: A Socio-Legal Analysis of Digital Branding and Child Rights

The digital environment associated with children is being increasingly shaped by commercial influence through subtle yet continuous forms of digital branding. Unlike traditional advertisements which are clear and distinguishable, digital branding in embedded within the games, educational and learning applications, social media content, content creations, making it extremely difficult to distinguish the content from the branding and understanding the passive influence it is creating on children’s minds. This paper examines how the laws-national as well as international fail to protect the children from such pervasive commercial influence. While the current laws focus on data protection, privacy, online safety, age verification, and parental consent, they largely overlook the destructive impact upon the cognitive and emotional development of a child under the impact of branding. Relying upon the Indian and international jurisprudence, including child protection and privacy cases, the paper reframes the idea of digital branding as a form of invisible exploitation that operates via power imbalance and design asymmetries rather than by coercion. By placing the digital branding issue within the human rights perspective, the paper argues that child’s dignity, autonomy, and freedom to thought is compromised when children-linked digital spaces are prioritised for profit making. The paper concludes by suggesting a child centric legal framework that makes digital intermediaries and platforms responsible and the need of shared duty of care between parents and the platforms and a recognition of commercial influence as a legitimate child protection concern in the digital age.