Anyone else encountered Tapestry?

[ChoccyJules]

DD starts school next week and YR use tapestry.info/index.html/ to create a weekly progress log for parents to access.
These involve a lot of photos. We can ask that DD is not featured in any group photos but they intend to take individual pics of her doing her daily tasks etc.
I'm not that tech savvy but my worry is that despite this being a secure site, with an individual DD page which only school and us have access to, if the thing is ever hacked her image is then online, no? and then open to the dreaded facial recognition software.
We are meeting school tomorrow to discuss a range of things and at that point they are going to talk us through using the website. What do we think?

Yes many Primary Schools and childminders use this system and it is secure. I can only hope that as Primary schools tend to be fanatical about child protection then this system must be very secure. I suppose everything on the web is at risk though. Would your child's bp really use facial recognition to track them down? If it were leaked, would they understand what tapestry even was or how significant that leak could be?I don't expect an answer to that. I allow my childminder to use tapestry even though sometimes I feel paranoid. I just try not to succumb too much to that paranoia as I live my life.

Sorry, I meant you don't have to answer my questions it is just good for thought

Some schools are quite clueless with it and don't even register that there is a potential issue wih picture sharing. My DC's school shared pictures of my DC with all parents without asking. Pictures were easily downloadable so could be transferred to social media and of course DC is in school uniform so easily to locate. My concern was other parents posting the pictures online wihout thinking. After I kicked up a fuss they stopped sharing my DC's picture but didn't take up the safeguarding issues more generally. The next school year the info wasn't passed on to the new teacher so pictures were shared again. Which reminds me....time to have that conversation all over again!

Our school used tapestry - there were two levels of consent: first to photograph your child, second to include in any group pics I.e. Where two children were playing together. I said yes to the first, no to the second. That meant any group pics were so heavily pixelated as to be just a bunch of squares really, which was fine. Mainly they tried hard to get shots of just DD, and to crop her out of any shots of other children. I liked Tapestry because it gave a lot of detail about how DD was doing each day, and I could add comments or posts from home. I say no to school photos by an external photographer, but I was happy with the security of Tapestry - like all things, it depends on it being used carefully though, to ensure other parents don't ever get images with your child in, because there's nothing to stop them downloading the image.

Thanks. We have said she is not to be seen in group photos and they should not enter her dob, to make future searches more difficult if the site was ever to become compromised. Her BPs would be unlikely to spot the opportunity but older siblings might.

I think I've relaxed a lot about this - which is easy for me because dd is pretty much unrecognisable now from placement and because bps are very unlikely to be searching for her.

If you're in a situation where a very identifiable four year old - whose bps are violent criminals who have said they will be tracking down the child and abducting them - has been placed with you I think you need to be hugely vigilant about these things.

Most of us in adoption probably fall somewhere between the two extremes of that child and my dd. There's no right answers to these questions choccy - your gut instinct is probably quite a good guide. But it strikes me that you've been very concerned about online security lately and I don't know if that is because you feel you have a real issue or because you've scared yourself with reading forums!

If it's the first one then obviously you don't need to tell us that and of course you should think everything through super carefully but if it's the latter I think it's worth saying that unless someone very tech savvy is actively searching for your child they are probably pretty safe with secure school portals.

for you whichever - it's not nice to be worried.

I think I'm just new to actually putting things into practice rather than very concerned. We had very little input about any kind of security, frankly, so my knowledge base on this is 99% from online friends and groups. I find it helpful to check what I think we should be doing against others' experience.

Okay - cool. Glad you're okay, have some and then instead