3 Reasons to Rethink Sharing Photos of Your Kids on Social Media

We live in a world where sharing photos of our children online has become common practice. Long gone are the days where photos of our little ones are shared exclusively with the people closest to us. It used to be the only time someone would see a photo of your kids was when they physically came over and you pulled out an oversized photo album or maybe briefly when you pulled out a picture from your wallet. However, with the rise of social media, this practice has since been abandoned.

Now, anyone with a smartphone and access to the internet can see photos of your children. What was once private is now available for the world to see and we share photos of our kids without giving it much thought, but is this a practice we need to reconsider?

Sometime last year, my wife and I decided to stop sharing photos of our daughter publicly. It was something we considered doing for a while but refrained from doing because we, like many of you, wanted to share photos of our daughter with friends and family. The easiest medium to do this was through social media, but something happened that made us rethink what we were doing.

Someone used a photo from my wife’s social media and created an account pretending to be her. I’m sure this story is not unfamiliar and happens more than we care to think but it was this event that made us think twice about what people would do with our daughter’s photos if they were willing to use photos of my wife in this way.

This leads me to my first point:

There are bad characters out there and we have a responsibility to protect our children from them. Even though most people who see your child’s photos aren’t going to use them nefariously, the internet is full of bad actors who have unfettered access to any photo you post publicly. Think about it. Would you hand images captured of your childs’ most precious moments to strangers on the street? No, so then why would we make these publicly available to anyone with the click of a button? The unfortunate reality is that we live in a broken world and as much as we want to share photos of our kids, we risk exposing them to people with ill intent. We live in a world where memes are made at people's expense, deep fakes are used for exploitation, companies mine our data, identities are stolen and God only knows what else. The benefits of sharing our childrens’ photos don’t outweigh the risk of their photos being exploited.

We can’t see the future. It’s possible, your child may not be as enthusiastic as you are about having their whole childhood exposed to strangers online. What may seem cute to share with family and friends is not so cute when it’s being shared with random people on the internet. There are some moments we have with our children the world shouldn’t be invited in on. It stands to reason that our kids may feel the same way as they grow older.

They may want to remain private and by sharing their photos publicly, they are robbed of the ability to decide for themselves if they even want a digital blueprint. I know it’s the norm to share photos of our children but I challenge you to reconsider the data we are voluntarily handing over. Our kid’s privacy immediately gets eliminated once photos of them go up online and this is not a genie that is so easily put back into the bottle. Once photos are out there, even innocuous ones, it can be difficult to permanently remove them from the internet.

Photos should be shared with people we trust. The people who have access to the photos of our children should be people we trust to be around them. I can’t say this about random strangers on the internet any more than I can say it about a random person I meet on the street. I’m not saying we have to go back to hard photo albums but maybe we set strict privacy settings on our social media that limit access to only those we know intimately? Maybe it’s time to purge your friend’s list to only people you trust?

The good news is most prominent social media platforms make it easy to custom tailor your privacy settings to give you better control over who sees what content. A feature I don’t think enough people take advantage of. Now, you still run the risk of the social media sites having access to your child’s photos but at least you can rest assured knowing strangers won’t have access to your children's most precious moments.

As for my family, we decided we don’t want to take the risk. We’d rather go back to a simpler time; a time where the only people who see photos of our kids are when we send them directly or we can always pull out an oversized photo album.