Paparazzi parents need to Stop | Think | Post

Proud parents. The world is full of them and there is nothing more fulfilling for many parents to show everyone just how proud they are of their children. This isn’t a bad thing, it’s a wonderful thing, however, in this day an age, the way this is done tends to be through social media and this is where the problem arises.

I am sure many of you have those particular friends in your Facebook connections whose feed is full of pictures of their children, from the moment they fall pregnant, through the whole pregnancy, the birth and then of every element of the child’s life right through until they graduate from high school in some cases. Again, this is not a bad thing, except when you aren’t thinking about the pictures you are taking, and more importantly, who can then see them.

We have said many times that the absolute base level for any social media user is privacy settings. Securing your online profiles and platforms so that only people you know and only those you want able to see the content, are able to. But still, today, in 2015, over 25% of Facebook’s 1.6 Billion users have not touched their privacy settings.

As many of you know, Beat The Cyberbully is an education and awareness initiative and this post is being written to make those proud parents amongst you Stop | Think | Post

A recent survey in the UK revealed that Facebook is the social media channel of choice for parents and 53% of them using it to share photos of their children.

Over half of those parents had posted pictures of children not their own and without their permission.

Nowadays, by the time a child is 5 years old, there is over 1000 pictures of them online!!

Why is this a problem? Well here in the UAE it’s a problem because it is now actually ILLEGAL to post a picture of someone and tag them on Facebook without their permission.

On top of that there are actual groups of people out there who will take that picture of your baby, post it as their own and then treat it as their own baby!! Don’t believe me, there’s a whole community out there #BabyRP on Instagram and see what you find. you can read more here about Digital Kidnapping and BabyRP – it’s worrying to say the least.

To top it all off, we have also recently seen the first case of a teenager succesfully suing his parents for posting pictures of him as a baby on Facebook without his consent. He won the case and £250,000!! Read more here

As always, we are trying to bring to the attention of parents the kind of thing they need to be wary of in this digital age. We have some amazing communication channels available to us today. Facebook is a great way to stay in touch with family near and far. We say do that, just make sure you lock your accounts and each of your posts down to only those people you trust and who you want to see the content.

For any parents that are reading this and thinking that there may well be a lot of pictures of their baby and children out there, might like to use a tool called Tineye to check where else pictures of your children are being used. Click the link and upload the pictures of your children that you have plastered Facebook with and it will tell you where else it’s being used, in its original format, but also modified as well.

Start consciously thinking about further down the line as parents. Posting all these pictures of your baby and children attaches each image to your child’s online reputation or tattoo. Before they can even talk, they have a footprint online, one they have no control over, and in many cases, one you have no control over either.

STOP | THINK | POST