We have to treat everything we post online as permanent.
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.Īnything you’ve ever posted online, even if deleted, is not guaranteed to disappear. Here is one mom’s very unfortunate experience with this exact thing…Īnd here is another story about an Australian investigation that revealed that millions of photos exploiting children online were stolen from social media. 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.” 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. But that is very unfortunately the reality of how predators view these images.Įven seemingly innocent photos of children have been stolen from social media & exploited in appropriate ways. 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. This is a good reason to avoid posting photos of babies in diapers, during bath time, or in other more “revealing” types of outfits. So, what are some of the risks of sharing photos of our children online?Įvil people use photos of children in heinous ways. We have to move forward with grace to make the positive changes we feel convicted to make. 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. 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’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. 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. You can check out some changes I am currently making on this blog, here. I still have SO much to learn & want to remain humbly open to the often inconvenient truths regarding this topic. 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. 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.Īs a parent and a photographer who works with children, I think that conversations about online photo safety are very important. 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. I also enjoyed the connection & solidarity I felt when sharing & seeing posts from other mamas on social media. Plus, as a ~millennial~ myself, sharing my life online was a practice I had known since I was a teenager. I was a proud mama and found great joy in sharing moments of them online. 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. From pregnancy & birth announcements to cute & funny photos from our every day life, I was pretty open about what I posted. I had always shared photos of my children on social media. To be honest, until recently, I wasn’t aware of all of the risks associated with sharing photos of kids online. Becoming aware of social media safety risks is changing how I share photos of kids online.
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