A Cyber safety expert has urged parents to take better protective measures when posting photos on social media.
With summer holidays winding up across the Hunter Region, and many children embarking on their first days at primary or high school, parents may be tempted to share these milestone moments on their Facebook or Instagram pages.
On Wednesday (27 January), the Australian Federal Police urged parents not to “post photos of their children on their first day of school without locking down their privacy settings”.
Cyberspace expert and former Victorian Police Officer, Susan McLean, who has 27 years’ experience working with the online safety of children, said there are various reasons why posting photos of children online is dangerous.
“One is that we know that pedophiles like to collect identifying photos of cute children,” she explained.
“And when you arrest a pedophile, you will find thousands of images of children they like the look of – it might be uniform photos, it might be wearing bathers, it might be sport clothes, so there’s that issue.
“Parents need to understand that, when they post an image, they’ve lost control over it. Even if you’re only sharing it with a private account, anyone within that private account can take it and use it.”
An Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report from January cites the risks of so-called ‘sharenting’, quoting data from a 2015 report outlining that three-quarters of parents with children aged up to four responded that they knew of another parents who they considered to be sharing too much information about their child on social media.
Similarly, a 2016 survey of 2,000 British parents found that, on average, parents “post nearly 1,500 photos by their child’s fifth birthday.”
Ms McLean said there was a “lack of understanding” among parents about how public their content could be on social media.
“Parents really do not understand the risk, and, you know, we’ve had the internet in our lives for many, many years, it is absolutely overdue for parents to get on top of this, because they are the gatekeepers to their child’s online safety,” she said.
She added parents should “absolutely” take the photos of their child’s milestone moments, and her advice was for parents to give greater thought to what they do with those photos.
“If you’re going to post them to social media, make sure your account is locked down to private, and that means friends only, not friends of friends or anything like that, it must be locked down, and it must only be a small number of trusted friends,” Ms McLean said.
“Make sure the image and the logo of the school is blurred, don’t take the photo in an identifiable location, not at your front door, not in your street.
“The other one, of course, is making sure that location services are turned off for the camera on your device, and that means you’re not embedding metadata in the photo which can be read, and that can include GPS coordinates of where that photo is taken, essentially your address.”
