We all do it, unthinkingly, but could all of those tidbits we put on Facebook and Instagram about our kids—status updates, photos, videos—one day come back to bite them (and us) in the ass?
Good social media etiquette tells us not to upload a photo of someone else's kid without tagging them. Yet as parents, are we compromising our kids' safety (not to mention their dignity) with what we give away about them every day? This fascinating article questions whether it's ethical to publish something "about someone who can’t give their consent."
Where it used to be that your parents would only whip out embarrassing photo albums when a boyfriend came around for dinner, these days our digital footprint starts the moment we're born and isn't safely confined to a bookshelf.
No wonder this generation is opting for transient sites like Snapchat, where uploads virtually disintegrate over time. As parents, we are charged with protecting our kids but what if, despite our best efforts to protect our kids, we are the very people endangering them?
At the risk of sounding paranoid, a recent US study found that of the 63% of moms that use Facebook a staggering 97% post photos of their children. And while most of us set privacy settings so that only our friends can see them, is that adequate, especially when many of us have hundreds of 'friends'?
Director of the Oxford Internet Institute, Victoria Nash, cautions against the type of information you choose to reveal, “...which might include things like date of birth, place of birth, the child’s full name, or tagging of any photographs with a geographical location—anything that could be used by somebody who wanted to steal your child’s identity."
A good question to ask yourself is before posting is would your child be comfortable with the world at large knowing this about them later on in life. We can speculate, but truly how are we to know?
Some parents opt to consistently use a pet name for their child online, which goes some way to ensuring protection against companies obtaining personal data.
The safest approach, obviously, is to post nothing. So having cold feet, technically speaking, I once deactivated my Facebook for close to a year because I was concerned about all those well-meaning photos of my son. However, it turned out that people in my circles (including my husband!) were still blithely posting images and information about us.
Though I've been back on FB for a while, this time I'm treading more carefully. I pre-approve any tagged images, but even that method relies on a lot of good faith that 'friends' always tag images.
The fact is, we just don't know what social media will look like by the time our kids become adults. Another round of leaked celebrity photos highlights just how vulnerable we are when it comes to tech, and our kids are perhaps the most vulnerable of all.
What measures do you take to protect your kids' privacy online? Read what our blogger Andrea Nair has done.
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