To not understand blurring the name of your child’s school out on social media?

[mysic]

Flurry of back to school posts complete with children in branded jumpers, however the schools name is removed (usually with a smiley face over it.) Why?

Assuming your social media is on friends only … what do people think will happen if they know your child is at St Mary’s Primary?

Because you don’t know what may happen in the future I suppose. Like the poor woman who married the pedophile teacher Jeremy Forrest and who had a blog about her wedding and every detail was published in the newspapers because the press couldn’t talk about the girl or about Jeremy Forrest.

How would they manage to access that assuming it’s set to friends only, though?

Privacy.

Means people know where your kid is during the day, which is a potential risk I suppose.

Even “friends only” doesn’t prevent photos being shared or copied or tracked back to your profile. The NSPCC recommends things like obscuring details of where DC go to school for safety reasons.

ETA: and most people’s profiles aren’t as “friends only” as the name suggests. Most people will have people on their friends list who they really don’t have much of a connection with anymore: old friends they’ve lost touch with, acquaintances, former colleagues etc. And no idea who those people might know.

You can't see the point of protecting your children online?

This. It is naive to think the picture will remain where you have put it. It's travelling to different cloud servers and could be intercepted by anyone at any point.

I mean surely the best way to protect them online is to not put them on there full stop?!

ETA: I suppose it’s the weird decision to make an effort to protect them by not sharing their school but not protecting them because everyone has seen their face, knows where they went on holiday, knows where their local restaurant is, knows their favourite toy, knows their and their siblings names, whatever really.

How very naive of you. Nothing is fully private when it goes online, nothing.

Because said friends can choose their own personal privacy settings with their own social media. Just because a parent chooses to be friends only doesn’t mean those friends
are friends only too with their privacy settings.

Plus, why would anyone need to know what school they go to in the first place unless the parents need them to pick up said child?

Once the photograph is taken on your phone and stored its on cloud servers though?

This!!

I don't understand why people hide the school name badge but don't hide the child's face too.

I don't post pictures on FB but if i did post a first day of school photo both the face and badge would be covered.

my dc have featured in the local paper which is now online in their uniform representing their school so I’ve never bothered blurring. You can usually see which groups people are on so it’s fairly obvious that if they’re on the st Mary’s primary school page their kids likely go there. Basically, it’s supposed to be for privacy but I’m not convinced it’s effective at all.

Considering your local random pedo can see your child walking down the street to school every day I've never really understood the worry tbh unless you have some kind of dodgy ex you're hiding from etc. Primary schools generally have extremely cautious procedures for allowing kids to leave with adults, and older children who can walk alone should have been taught never to go with another adult unless they have spoken to mum to confirm etc. So no, I can't really see the point of hiding their badge. Also anyone local will know from the jumper colour which school it is!

I was nonplussed when someone posted a starting school picture to our NCT group chat (6 of us) and scribbled over the school name. I like to think she was reusing a photo she had posted elsewhere, but it felt a bit odd. I don't post pictures of my daughter on social media, but I wouldn't obscure details if sending to friends.

I don’t think people realise that the uniform itself is normally a huge give away for what school they attend. Especially if people know the area, most school have the uniform on the school website so if someone wanted to find out they easily could.
So if people have concerns they really shouldn’t post photos in uniform at all

Well, one of my bank security questions is 'name of your first school' so I'm glad my mum didn't plaster that all over the internet (although that would have been impossible in 1985). I don't share any photos of DC on social media at all, when they are old enough they can choose to share or not.

Oh yes definitely, but photos posted on Facebook are much more at risk from exposure, misuse, or permanent availability than photos stored in private cloud storage. Not least because when you post, you essentially give Facebook a license to use your content.

I agree.

Ive never put a picture of my child online, but if I did, I wouldn’t feel like the name of the school added a huge risk, on top of the risk from sharing your children in the first place. For example, the town I grew up in has 3 primary schools, one with a blue uniform, one with green, one with red. If you post a picture of your child in their uniform, then if anyone can work out the town you live in, they can work out the school. We now live in a small village with one primary school - same thing. If anything on your SM suggests where you live, the school is very easy to work out.

Covering up the school name/logo feels a bit performative tbh. “Even though it’s probably very obvious which school they go to based on the rest of my oversharing Instagram/FB, aren’t I wonderful for protecting my child. Scroll down to see 50 pictures of them on holiday”.

Just don’t put them online.

I don’t see a reason to put pictures of your kids online at all. I send pics to my family members abroad when they ask, but frankly I don’t think my Facebook friends want to see a bunch of pictures of my kids. Maybe I’m paranoid, but it’s not like it’s a big deal and imo not even worth risking. A lot of child predators use pics of kids they know to request abuse images and unfortunately you really do never know.

You do know that's not how it works, right?
If I share something as friends only, it is completely irrelevant what my friends have their fb set to (which can be different for each post by the way). Their settings only apply to what they personally post, not to what other people they are friends with post.
If I make a post of mine public it doesn't mean that every friend on my fb can now have their posts seen by everyone because I'm friends with them 🙄

A relative threatened to kidnap our children and take them abroad - they have some dodgy friends and links overseas so we felt it was a credible threat.

We moved cities without telling anybody who is in touch with that relative, and blocked lots of people on social media, but there is no way to prevent people that we are friends with from sharing photos and we don’t control what happens to them once shared.

It’s been a few years now, but they would still be able to recognise our kids if they saw a photo, so there is absolutely nothing online that links us or our kids to this city or this school.

Our kids also always have trackers on them, have been taught that this relative is not a safe person etc etc, but the main piece of advice we had when we reported the threat to the police was to keep our kids’ locations off social media.

It's a weird level of paranoia that the world is out to get their children, but not enough paranoia that they can let the opportunity for validation from Facebook likes pass them by.

I read a really interesting article the other day including comments the police themselves saying it us absolutely pointless blurring the same of a school. If you post your child at all there can be enough identifying information, the colour of the uniform, pic outside the school etc that can make it easily identifiable to someone wanting to know what school a child attends.
Their advice was to keep child off SM completely or just post the picture. Its highly unlikely a predator is going to rock up to a school saying I'm Millie's Dad and leaving with her! School have strict policies now.

Who needs to know which school the children attend?

It's up to the parents if they don't want to publicise their school.