The Risks of Posting Photos of Kids Online
Becoming aware of social media safety risks is changing how I share photos of kids online.
To be honest, until recently, I wasn’t aware of all of the risks associated with sharing photos of kids online. I had always shared photos of my children on social media. From pregnancy & birth announcements to cute & funny photos from our every day life, I was pretty open about what I posted. I would consider things like not sharing our current location for safety reasons or not sharing something that I felt was inappropriate or detrimental to their wellbeing in anyway, but my worries didn’t stretch far beyond those parameters. I was a proud mama and found great joy in sharing moments of them online. Plus, as a ~millennial~ myself, sharing my life online was a practice I had known since I was a teenager. I also enjoyed the connection & solidarity I felt when sharing & seeing posts from other mamas on social media.
Recently however, I have been doing research into the topic of online photo safety in regards to what we post of our kids and what I have found so far has been very eye-opening, to say the least. There is a varying degree of likelihood & impact of each of the risks I’ve been learning about, but nonetheless, I feel convicted about some of the ways I was previously sharing online.
As a parent and a photographer who works with children, I think that conversations about online photo safety are very important. I am not speaking out about any of these issues because I think I have it all figured out or to shame other parents’ about the ways they currently share online, I simply want to share what I am learning and start conversations about these issues so that we can protect the safety, identity, & innocence of our children online. I still have SO much to learn & want to remain humbly open to the often inconvenient truths regarding this topic. You can check out some changes I am currently making on this blog, here.
So, what are some of the risks?
Of course, there are risks associated with everyyything we do with our kids - right? We can’t live in constant fear, but awareness does help us make wiser choices as best we can! We aren’t going to stop taking our kids to the park or letting them try new things or sending them to school just because of potential risks, but knowing what those risks are inform our decisions so we can do what we believe is best as their parent.
I’ll tell you right now that this isn’t a “feel-good” type of blog… but I do hope that some of these topics might spark a positive change in your life. And I hope that you’ll read this blog with grace for yourself & others as you may be learning about some of these risks for the first time. I felt a lot of regret & shame over some of the ways I had previously shared about my kids online when learning about these things, but that isn’t a feeling we should live in. We have to move forward with grace to make the positive changes we feel convicted to make.
So, what are some of the risks of sharing photos of our children online?
Evil people use photos of children in heinous ways.
This is a good reason to avoid posting photos of babies in diapers, during bath time, or in other more “revealing” types of outfits. I feel sick as I type this. I know that photos like these are often sweet & innocent memories for parents and it’s horrible to think of how people could see them as anything different than that. But that is very unfortunately the reality of how predators view these images.
Even seemingly innocent photos of children have been stolen from social media & exploited in appropriate ways. They have been posted to fetish social media accounts, manipulated & edited to be used as child sexual abuse material (formerly known as child porn) on websites, and shared on baby role-play social media accounts. I have seen some of these social media accounts myself and even though many have been reported, they are often not taken down by Instagram because they don’t “explicitly violate the terms of use.”
Here is one mom’s very unfortunate experience with this exact thing…
And here is another story about an Australian investigation that revealed that millions of photos exploiting children online were stolen from social media.
These risks above are obviously some of the most shocking & disturbing, but let’s chat about other potential risks that might be overlooked as well.
The internet is forever.
Anything you’ve ever posted online, even if deleted, is not guaranteed to disappear. We have to treat everything we post online as permanent. When I think about it that way, it definitely changes the way I think about sharing online. Because something I may have thought was cute or funny to share of my kids at one time might be something I change my mind about later on. But at that point, it could be too late.
For example, I’ve recently been going back through the photos I’ve shared online in various places & formats (this has been quite a commitment of time) & I have been trying to clean up what I’ve shared to align with my current values. As I was deleting photos from my Pinterest account, I learned that even if you delete a Pin that you created & shared, if it has been re-pinned by someone else, you no longer have control or ownership of that Pin. So even if I delete my original photo, several copies of it could still exist on Pinterest… Eek.
I will definitely tread more lightly moving forward.
What we share of our kids when they’re young could impact our relationship with them in the future.
Children who are not old enough to consent to what is shared of them right now, may one day have an opinion about what was shared of them. And it may not be a positive one. Regardless of how well-meaning our intentions are when we share about kids online, it’s hard to guess how they might feel about those posts when they grow up. What might be funny or cute to us as parents, could potentially be embarrassing to our children.
A teenager shared his honest feelings about being posted on his mom’s instagram & blog in this reddit thread. This story was convicting for me to read.
It’s important to teach our kids that “no means no” when it comes to what is shared of them online. (Amongst other things.)
As loving parents, I’m sure you & I both wouldn’t want someone else to post something of our child that would upset, embarrass, or harm them. And we would never want to do that either.
But in order to empower our children to stand up for themselves, we need to teach them that they have a say in their online identity. And that starts with us. I think we should be having conversations with our kids who are old enough about what we are sharing of them online & asking for their permission. If they’re too young to understand what is being shared of them, we should weigh heavily what we share about them when they’re too young to say yes or no. There is a power gap here that we need to keep in mind…
An incredible resource I have found on this topic is lawyer, author, photographer, & mom Stacey Steinberg. She has done extensive research on the topic of where a parents’ rights to share online intersect with their children’s right to privacy. I have learned so much from the articles she has written on similar topics and from her book Growing Up Shared: How Parents Can Share Smarter on Social Media and What You Can Do to Keep Your Family Safe in a No-Privacy World.
Children can feel violated when people they don’t know know a lot about them.
Even those of us with private accounts probably have several followers that know us, but don’t know our children personally. And those of us with public accounts definitely have followers that our kids have never met personally. It can feel disarming for children when they are approached in public by people they don’t know who know things about them that the child has not personally disclosed.
It could even be something nice like, “Hey! I heard you won your soccer game on Saturday, that’s awesome.” But if our children don’t know the person talking to them, it makes sense that it would feel a little bit eerie that that person would know specific information about them that they hadn’t offered up.
This could also make it harder for our kids to differentiate between someone who could be a potential predator/stalker and someone who is simply a distant friend of ours that follows us on social media.
The future impact on our kids is unknown.
There are still several unknowns regarding how what we post of our children now could impact their future relationships, education, job opportunities, etc.
In this interview with Stacey Steinberg, author of Growing Up Shared, podcast host Leonie Smith tells the story of a child whose “funny” photo posted to their parents private Instagram account was turned into a meme by a friend (all in good fun), but unfortunately went viral. It’s hard to guess how the “grumpy baby” in the meme might feel about that meme when she’s applying for jobs as an adult.
The words we speak over our children matter.
The words we speak over our children influence what they believe about themselves & when we speak words over them publicly on the internet, there is no taking them back. As a parent, we might say something casually about how “free spirited” or “stubborn” or “silly” our child is online, meaning no harm. But we may unintentionally be putting them into a specific box that’s hard to break free from later on as they grow up & change & create an identity of their own.
Identity fraud will likely be an even bigger issue for our children’s generation.
It is predicted that our children will face more issues with identity fraud than ever before because of the personal identifying information we have casually offered up about them online - for many of us since before they were even born.
It’s common practice to share first day of school photos that reveal where our children go to school, birth announcements with their date of birth, full name, & hospital name, photos of our home that reveal our address, & lots of other personal identifying information.
In this article, researches guess that by the year 2030, the information we share about our kids online may make up 2/3rds of all identity theft.
Geez Suzy, so what now?
I know this blog is a major buzz kill. Maybe you’re considering some of these ideas for the first time & it all feels shocking & discouraging. Or maybe some of these topics have only affirmed a concern that you had already felt stirring in regards to all of this. Again, my purpose in chatting about these potential risks is to help us all make more informed decisions about what we share of our children online. And that will vary for each of us!
My biggest encouragement to you would be to do research of your own. Ask hard questions and be willing to hear the inconvenient answers. Talk to your children, if they’re old enough to understand.
I’ll leave you with these 3 practical questions that Stacey Steinberg suggests asking before sharing photos of your kids online:
Is it dangerous?
Is it embarrassing?
Is it helpful? (Does it help me, my child, my family, my community)
And if you’d like some ideas for where to start on posting more safely about your kids online, here is a blog I wrote about some changes I am currently making & another blog on changes you can make today to share more safely online.