AIBU to remind you to be careful with "first day" photos?

[AChickenCalledDaal]

Just seen a friend's "first day at secondary school" photo online. Two happy children, in recognisable school uniform, next to a clearly readable little sign that displays their very distinctive house name and the street number.

AIBU to remind people that there's little point nagging their teenagers about internet safety, if their parents don't follow simple precautions themselves?

I agree OP. Our local police force has just released a social media post about hiding the school logo and not having door numbers visible in photos. There’s a reason they have published this.

HAHAHA @ArgumentativeAardvaark

I'll start by declaring my dislike for sharing any pictures of children on Social Media, they can't really consent as they are generally not fully aware of the implications of having their data online. It becomes worse if they are tagged in the photos.

Assuming these children aren't tagged and ignoring the fact that I don't think they should be up at all, I don't see any issue with them being in school uniform or being outside their identifiable house (as opposed to unidentifiable photos).

The fear of Pedos in this Country is really kind of weird imo. A vast majority of child abuse happens within the family unit. It is letting dodgy uncles babysit that is the danger to children, it's about not spotting the signs or trusting people who shouldn't be trusted. The danger of something like this is just incredibly minimal.

If this post isn't about Pedos then I'm not sure the point, if it is then I get the point but feel it is pretty ridiculous.

Nobody cares which school your DC go to. It’s highly unlikely a predator is seeking out photos of children from local schools to stalk them on the way home and attack them. Primary school children don’t go home alone, secondary school children usually walk in groups or get the bus.

This is a non issue.

Also the vast majority of child abuse and murder comes from relatives or family friends.

The vast majority of child abuse occurs within families not from strangers. Getting rid of uniform would help with identification. Hate uniform - totally pointless.

@whattodowith you beat me to it!

The media get het up about how unsafe our children are making themselves online. My two teenagers are more savvy than anyone i know about this. So are their friends.

It's my friends in their 40s and 50s who have posted 10 pictures a day of their children since day one (some naked) and post holiday pics before they get home that never ceases to amaze me.

(Not to mention the amount who use the phrase 'netflix and chill' completely out of context which is quite funny)

Sigh. Yes the vast majority of abuse/murder happens within family units.
But it’s usually a step-parent or friend of a parent and the #1 modus operandi of a peado is to cozy up to the parent to get to their kid(s).
So, paedo trolls through SM sees a cute kid....and then looks up their single mum or dad and makes friends with them. Maybe starts a sexual relationship. Gets introduced to the real objective, the kid. Offers to babysit. (There are both male and female abusers)
You have to get it out of your head that most paedos become paedos AFTER they join a family when most deliberately target a single parent of a kid whose photo they saw or they saw in person one day. You’re underestimating them.

Look at the stats for the amount of children abducted in the UK, then compare it with the amount that have been abused and killed by family members or a family friend.

My granddaughter's primary school sent a welcoming email to parents. In it was a suggested internet safety list. It was suggested that the school logo was covered up with an emoji.
Wouldn't it make more sense for the schools not to have individual uniforms? Just have a generic one for all the schools (or not have one at all).

Where I live the new P1 intakes all have their photos in the local paper with their full names.

What in the world?

If your account is private, both Facebook and Instagram ( and completely private with no posts viewable and closed friends list, and minimal biography information) there is nothing wrong with sharing the back to school shots.
BUT.
When a parent has a public Facebook or Instagram and posts an image of a back to school shot, location tagged, with the school name, and a picture of their child - they not only often name the child in full, but their own accounts are open- so further details about the family and the child are revealed.
The days of a newspaper safely publishing first day kids should be gone, because a child's full name may be cross referenced with parent surnames if a school has a Facebook or Instagram account, and said parents interact with it.

Aside from the risk of online grooming (additionally, a surprising number of parents also link to children's social media if they are slightly older) the data provided within these public accounts often contains enough information to construct a false identity.
You can gain a child's DOB, full name, parents names, jobs, educational institutions, and DOBs, and often street addresses, plus where a child was born. By the time a child reaches the age where they wish to gain bank accounts of their own, and ID documents - they can find their identity has been stolen.

Secondly, what these families with no account privacy also hand out are enough details about the family for a stranger to convince a child they are indeed a family friend. Name of the pets, family nicknames, where the child has been on holiday, mum's best friends, all the relatives names, what the child did for their most recent birthday and the names of their siblings. Enough to convince a child that this person does indeed know their family.

Finally, little kids in uniform, and little kids at dance classes posted on a proud parents public Instagram account are paedophile fodder. They aren't going to be leaping the fence of your home, but they will collect the images of children they find attractive, and add them to their libraries which are shared amongst others of their ilk. Open parent accounts then provide many more image of said cute child and thus many more images are copied and fielded around the world to be found by police when searching for missing and trafficked children amongst these copied images from Instagram and Facebook. Even the idea of an image of my child being a mastubatory tool for creeps worldwide is enough for me to never post anything about my kids, even if I do have very private social media. ( Back to school shots are a doorway to locating that cute kid initially, as is searching school location tags).

Personally I think, spamming your child across the world via social media shows no respect for their privacy, and their future digital footprint. There are risks involved. Not securing your Facebook account, or your Instagram is incredibly silly and irresponsible if you wish to share images of your kids.

Long ( Sorry).

Honestly social media safety is just mostly ignored.

We've a police force who felt it was ok to publish on their Twitter and Facebook pages (both open access) a copy of a letter banning people from a vulnerable persons property for their safety. Big grinning faces the PCs all proud because they'd got this block and hidden the persons name. However, they hadn't hidden their address and just in case people couldn't be bothered to find out where the address was took the photo outside the property.

They were burgled and assaulted within days of it being put up.

Turned out the background was the house was being used as some sort of holding place for drugs!

Then there was the psychiatric nurse who went home to find an ex patient they'd discharged on their doorstep with a shotgun (they'd locked their account but hadn't kept track of who their "friends" were and some were patients).

Another nurse went on holiday checking in all the way where they were and got home to find it was ransacked, another who had "friends" that they didn't know. Insurance refused to pay out.

Finally the nurse who went on holiday abroad after telling her colleagues she was seriously ill for two weeks and even got a GP letter to confirm she was ill - her manager, me, was following her on her Facebook - that was a nightmare to sort out given the GP letter they provided so the GP was implicated as well.

(The last three were when I worked at NHS trust dealing with Internet safety).

My point - even people who should know better about Internet safety and social media ignore the rules and there are more reasons for concern than child abuse.

OP, can you explain clearly what the risk is here?

Are you saying that someone who already has a target child in mind would stalk their parents facebook in the hope that one day they might post something that would allow them to work out which school the child goes to and where they live?

How would this even come about? Would they see a child in the street and somehow find out the name of the parent then be able to identify them on facebook and hope their settings were slack?

I need a specific scenario to understand why this is a problem.

And before anyone says it of course I'm not talking about children whose whereabouts can't be known as clearly a parent who would post in that situation is missing a sandwich from their picnic.

Do the people who think this is an issue take their DC to school in plain clothes, blacked out vehicles and have multiple decoy drivers?

And there have been cases where photos of children's faces have been used for abuse photos and passed around, where their faces are imposed on inappropriate images. So even though the original picture might just be them in uniform it becomes something much more sinister.

Also some people have Facebook from when it first started and have never needed to confirm their identity so their names are made up.

I wouldn't put my children on social media even if it was fully locked down (because there's no such thing).

@Wakeupalready I totally agree with all the points you have made. Most of us haven’t grown up with the internet, I think many are unaware of the risks of creating such a huge digital footprint for our children. Maybe they won’t have paedos breaking into their house to grab them, but there are many other risks.

There are plenty of tools to remove stickers/emojis from photos if people really want to, so if you’re using that to cover up a school badge/your naked toddler on the beach then it’s useless.

Of course the school your children attend is visible to anyone they pass as they walk down the street. But I don’t think people grasp how broadcasting the details online reaches an exponentially bigger audience.

I think the issue is less about child abuse and more about identity theft. Someone talked about soft and hard targets. There are sadly some very soft targets and it relates less to children whose parents post first day of school photos and more to parents with poor personal boundaries/ judgment and lack of engagement or like the op mentioned, who let their 6 year olds have open fun accounts ffs.

Identity theft/ data mining is much more likely and is a real risk. I’m amazed at the people who answer ‘fun’ Facebook quizzes like ‘your porn name is the name of your first pet plus your mother’s maiden name’ and have people falling over themselves to tell the world the answers to 2 basic security questions. Or ‘your month of birth is the your next holiday destination’.

I agree with the OP. Far too much information is available quite easily in SM and we need to be more careful. Watch far too many crime shows

Yanbu I totally agree, I was surprised barely any of my Facebook friends thought to cover school logos. Yes it is a very small risk, but why do it??

Any of these kind of photos I have seen on face book are from friends and family. I already know where they live and have actually been to their house.

Eh, I think if someone were interested in where we lived they'd follow us/my child home from school.

That said I don't post back to school photos online, and find other's ones dull. No I don't care that little Johnny is excited, or a year older. Only you do. Maybe your parents. So text them a photo so I can get back to politics and cute photos of cats.

I do think it pays to be moderately careful, but not over the top.

Children are still targeted mostly by known family and friends to the parent.

We should keep an eye on just leaving them with anyone, vet babysitters, keep an eye on sports and music clubs etc, and give them the confidence and trust to talk to us.

I don’t have a FB public profile and I sometimes post first day pics, but the school posts pictures too on its website. I’m careful who I add on FB and keep an eye on privacy settings.

I’ve a teenager and a vulnerable younger child. So far the biggest threats to my kids have been:

• family members around younger child letting their kids or other friends etc play alone with my child without supervision. I only let kids that I know extremely, extremely well play with younger child out of eye shot and I always supervise closely.
• activity clubs. One special needs club wanted me not to attend however I did not feel that they supervised closely enough. E.g. let other kids go to the toilet in sports centre alone.
• older teenager using chat websites and or going onto social media from games with people they’d met online gaming. I had to go through strict rules about this, ban some sites, and go through all the accounts to make sure he’d not put identifying details - age, location, school etc.

The above were all more of an immediate concern than school uniforms.

I agree with you OP. I think children have got a right to privacy and there daily life should not be branded on the internet. I never post pictures of my son online.