These days, sharing photos of your kids on social media is not only normal—it’s almost expected. However, before you upload all your latest vacation pics to Facebook, consider the potential ramifications of putting those images online.
Online safety and privacy issues are important for everyone, but they become even more crucial when kids are involved. Did you know children are more likely to think that parents should have rules to follow and the child’s permission before sharing photos, or that children under eighteen are fifty-one times more likely to have their identities stolen—often as a result of oversharing online?
With certain precautions, it is definitely possible to share your family photos safely and securely online. Here are a few tips to keep your kids’ privacy intact in the age of social media.
1. Make Sure the Privacy Settings Are Cranked Up
Set up your social accounts so that only friends—not friends of friends—can see your posts. Friends of friends open up your photos to an enormous number of viewers and leave you almost no control over who sees what you post. For Facebook, head to your settings panel and follow the company’s instructions for maximizing privacy controls.
2. Turn Off Location Tagging
Many social media sites, including Facebook, try to include your location in posts by default—a setting known as geotagging. Many smartphones will automatically tag photos with the location they were taken in. If you’re concerned about privacy, turn these features off. While it can be nice to look back at photos and see where they were taken, when you publish these shots online, that information—called metadata—is often published with them. It is possible for people to dig up that data and see exactly where you were and when you were there.
3. Make Sure Your Friends Are Actually Your Friends
Do you know and trust everyone on your friends' list? Many people have hundreds of friends. With that many people able to view your profile, the odds are high that you don’t know all of them as well as you think you do. Go through your friends' list periodically and make sure you are comfortable with the people who have access to your posts.
4. Use Photo-Sharing Sites Rather Than Social Media
Consider skipping social media altogether. Instead, upload your family photos to a more secure service like Dropbox or Flickr, and then share a link to the album with only the specific people you know and trust. This is probably the safest way to go as it bypasses the potential pitfalls of social sites completely and you have more control over who is able to access the photos.
While it is definitely possible to share your family photos safely, ask yourself if your child would want their picture shared in the first place. Or, if they’re old enough, ask them! Their answer might surprise you.
Emily Long is a safety expert for SafeWise. She is passionate about promoting safe and healthy habits for day-to-day living. When she isn’t writing about safety and well-being, she can be found teaching yoga, road tripping, or hiking in the mountains.
