The four golden rules to protect our children’s privacy

When talking about minors and respecting their privacy, “caution” should be the keyword. But is it always like this? Are we careful enough when dealing with images and sensitive data of children?

With this article we intend to offer you practical advice to respect your children’s right to privacy.

Social Networks are full of photos of minors: this is a phenomenon that everyone can see. In fact, daily more and more adults choose to share images of their children on their profiles, often not being well aware of the risks of such behavior.

Recently, in the article Our childr en are not social media trophies. Here is how to protect their privacy, we talked about how parents’ desire to show their children on the web can become obsessive. We have also dealt with the dangers related to the proliferation of photos of children online, first of all child pornography, an even more real and looming problem than we might think.

Now we will try to give you suggestions, to prevent unpleasant situations in a few steps.

1. You can leave your children off the web

To avoid any sort of inconvenience, the first thing that could be done is not to share images of minors on the net. The desire to show to relatives and close friends photographs or videos that immortalize important moments of your children is understandable and healthy; this does not mean that this sharing can take place without the use of a Social Network. You can show videos or photos directly in person to whomever you want, on your phone, a camera, or paper albums (yes, they still exist!)

If you want to rely on a private and “secure” social network for your privacy conditions, we would suggest “Signal,” an easy to install app that is similar to Whatsapp.

2. If you need a vehicle on the net, choose private channels

It may also happen that some of the people we want to show pictures of our children are not physically close to us, for they live in another city or even in another country.

In this case (besides noting again that the photos can be printed and sent in the mail), to share images quickly and inexpensively it may be useful to use the Internet. Our advice, however, is to use private, non-public channels to send photos and videos. For example, better an email or Whatsapp message than an Instagram or Facebook post.

3. Avoid taking close-ups; instead obscure children’s faces

If, after all that has been said, you still want to publicly share family photos (for example images of your holidays in which your children are also present), a way to protect them is not to post pictures in which the children are in the foreground or to draw a picture, an emoticon, or something else to cover their faces and make them unrecognizable.

4. Never post photos in which children are naked

It is best to avoid in the most absolute way publicizing images in which children, even if only a few months old, are naked. For example, it’s best not to share pictures of them taking a bath or playing on the beach.

As reported in an article published in The Huffpost, about half of the photos of children circulating on the Internet end up in the wrong hands… a percentage too high not to ask ourselves how we are experiencing this aspect of our online life and not to decide to change course if we were endangering our children.