Carly My baby is just over a year old now and I can count on one hand the number of pictures with his face and name attached. Most of these photos were posted just after he was born and before we really knew what it felt like to be parents. Before he was born, we had thought about our policy for his being posted online. We shared this with our friends and families and, for the most part, this has been met with compliance. However, we have since made our policy even stricter. Here are three reasons I don’t post my child on the internet.
Right to privacy
I saw a content creator make this analogy: imagine you and your child are backstage at a show that stars you. You are the main act and, out there, is a sold-out show. Every seat is filled. Without asking your child, you shove them out on stage alone. The bright lights are shining in their face and the crowd is screaming and shouting at them. Imagine how scared they’d be. How confused they’d be. I imagine my son crying and scrambling to come and find me. This is an image that reminded me of my son’s right to his privacy. He deserves the right to not have everyone know his name. He deserves to get to decide how he shows up on the internet for the first time, the same way I did. He at least deserves the right to not have his intimate moments like bath times, naked baby pictures, or other potentially embarrassing memories, be cemented into a public history to last forever. It simply isn’t fair.
My child’s safety
The transparency of the internet isn’t something we’ve grasped as a society yet. There are entire accounts where people dedicate themselves to proving just how easy it is to find someone in real life based on even the smallest details given online. My biggest fear is for someone to be able to find my child’s school or to know where we live and to use this for malicious intent. I think most parents would agree that their child’s physical safety is one of their top priorities and yet they aren’t prepared to acknowledge what a serious threat to their child’s safety the internet is. What’s more, they’re actively allowing the internet access to their child and even giving out their information!
Malicious intent with content
Even if someone never intends to even meet my child or physically harm them, there can still be malicious intent. Websites exist, disguised as child modeling sites, that are reposting photos and videos lifted from social media of children doing seemingly normal things and are being modeled as child pornography. These pedophiles are even manipulating this stolen content to make the child appear to be doing things they weren’t in the original photo. The worst things you could imagine are the things being said and done on these sites with photos we post of our children. One Australian study found that nearly half of all child pornography is from social media.
While I’m not saying you shouldn’t be posting at all about your child, you should know the risks. It is so easy to not post pictures of your children online so know that, by doing so, you are making a choice. All I hope to do for my own child is to make as many good choices as I can.
For more information on how I choose to parent my children, follow along on my social media, which, spoiler, will not include images of my child. For my normal travel-related content, you can find my blog posts here.
