The Parent’s Guide to the Net: How You Can Avoid Violating Your Child’s Privacy
One of the newer things that the internet brought was the speed and the vast reach of the information that we share goes. An image that has been uploaded in the US could be seen in the opposite part of the globe in a matter of seconds. This is a fact of life that not a lot of people—particularly new parents—seem to really understand.
Something that can be uploaded and shared can be re-shared and even seen by complete strangers. Strangers, which in actuality, may not have the best intentions for the information that you so willingly share. Before we get started, we would once again want to welcome you to Fishnet! We are your consistent partners for the discussions about the World Wide Web.
For today’s discussion we wanted to touch upon a topic which we feel is quite relevant especially when lot of the younger generation of internet users are now at the age where they are starting families and are quite guilty of “sharenting”. If you’re not all that familiar with the term, don’t worry about it since we are going to break it down for you. Let’s get started!
The Concept of Sharenting
The word “sharenting” comes from both “sharing” and “parenting”. People, in general, have normalized the use of social media and how it is now rather common to share information about our lives, our activities, and so many other things. One of these things happens to be the information about the whole journey of pregnancy, birthing, and even the lives of our children.
A lot of new parents (and grandparents) have been guilty of sharing too much on social media. In recent surveys, it has been found out that nearly 92% of all children under the age of 2 have their own social media pages. These are pages which are created by their parents or grandparents that want to make it easier to tag their child (or grandchild) in social media posts about them. This is not only quite annoying for people on your friend list but it is also a very serious security risk.
What You Should Not Upload
Our technological advancements have made it a lot easier to share information with other people. However, a lot of people tend to not consider if there are certain things that are best kept off the web. If you’re not quite sure what those things are, here’s a quick guide that you can use.
DO NOT: Share Your Child’s Sensitive Photos
A lot of parents like to document pretty much everything from the daily progress of eating, sitting up, rolling around, and the eventual journey of potting training. One mother in the USA had the nightmare of having her seemingly innocent photos of her son’s potty training from her blog turned into fodder for known pedophile websites.
It no longer matters that the source material is seemingly innocent. All they need to do is get photos, run it through photoshop, make it sexually explicit, and the rest is history. While it cannot be helped that parents or other relatives will want to upload photos of kids, it is important to remember to not upload any images that are sensitive.
Sensitive photos include:
- Showing states of undress
- Showing identifiable locations that the child frequents (schools, churches, stores)
- Showing school uniforms or sports teams
These photos are dangerous because they give very visual markers and clues on who your child is and where they can be found. The uniform or types of school can be used to infer how much the spending capacity of your household is an can make your child a target for kidnapping.
DO NOT: Share Information That Compromises Your Child’s Security
A lot of people think that privacy and security can’t be put at risk because of a status update. Something that can be as innocuous as “Finally enrolled Jane at St. Johns!” or “Time for another ballet class at Happy Feet!” can be pretty damaging to the security of your child. Anyone who has access to your profile and has ill-intent toward your child will now have a clear idea of their schedule and whether or not you will always be there with the child.
This is information that you willingly share on the internet. This is information that can and will be used against you and your child if it is necessary to achieve the goals of the person who has bad designs on your family.
There are other status updates that you can create that can compromise the security of your child. Here are some of them:
- Statuses about the exact location of a child’s extra curricular activities or projects
- Statuses about family vacation plans and itineraries
- Statuses about being away from your child
These statuses are dangerous because they provide critical information regarding the current state of your child. Are they alone? Where will they be? How likely would an opening to kidnap or engage them exist?
DO NOT: Create Social Media Profiles for Infants and Young Children
Vanity is a terrible thing and social media enables vanity in spades. Social media is hardly secure. They can get hacked and they can certainly change their privacy settings without having to tell their users anything. This means that you may believe that the account that you made for your child is secure but that can change in the blink of an eye.
Most social media do not even allow children under the age of 13 to join the platform so parents who violate this rule end up setting a bad example.
We hope that today’s discussion gave attention to a subject that has long been ignored and has become a glaring problem. The internet is a tool that can be used for both good and bad intentions. Social media is a product of the internet that should be used responsibly—especially when children are in the picture. Now we want to pass on a question to you: what do you think are the things that parents do to compromise the privacy and security of their children?
