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?

People shouldn't be posting the name of their children's schools, but nor should they be posting their children's faces. It's fucking terrifying what can be done with their images, aside from the fact that children can't consent to creating a digital footprint. Wrong on so many levels.

You’re assuming social media is all set to friends only.

It wouldn't be long until everyone just posts this on the first day of school!

Why does it bother you people blurring out the name of their kids school 🫤

I do it with DN as that's what his Mummy did. I'm not 100% sure of her reasons, but she always blurred the name of his nursery so I do too. It's a little thing that makes no real difference to me but is something that I can do as she would have if she could.

I do with my youngest DD. She's taxied to school nearly 50 mins away to the colour uniform could be one of twenty schools.
Mainly because I can't be arsed with the risk of another debate over the cost of her school transport if someone sees it and takes umbridge over it. I've been caught out by two friends getting really arsey about it in the last year or so.
It's not my fault the school literally in my street cannot take a child in a wheelchair or with her care needs.

I don't post anything online like photos of the DC.

I've unintentionally clicked on people's profiles when scrolling. I'm shocked that some have open profiles and the amount of personal information they share

I think that’s how I see it; it’s performative. Because if you really were so bothered about their privacy, you just … wouldn’t post them!

Because not all social media friends are actually friends.

It doesn’t bother me, it just puzzled me a little bit. I do have friends on my list who I suppose I can’t completely guarantee won’t try to abduct DS from his primary school but it seems unlikely he is at any risk from knowing this fact!

People onward share and AI can utilise images depending on where they get stored, posted or forwarded.

A digital image has left your control once you share it.

It's nothing to do with abduction

It's to do with how much information you want to publish about a child.

That’s a really good argument for not putting images on at all but I’m specifically asking about the school name thing

You can be friends with someone and then an incident can happen in your life like the Coldplay couple for example and somebody who is your friend can think ‘actually I could sell this photo of my friend from her facebook for a thousand pounds’.

So that if it gets onward shared or scraped by AI it is a picture of an unknown child at an unknown school, not a picture of an unknown child from a named school.

The more info you publish, the more info you publish - there are various people making various choices.

Why would you want your friends knowing what school your children went to?

The question you should be asking yourself is why do you want to know what schools all of these children with blurred photos go to? Why does it effect you?

As for you thinking it’s performative - every single thing a person posts on social media is performative, it’s done for the attention and likes!

We never truly know someone 100% even on our friends list, nobody is going to put a warning status out saying they have thoughts about children, so maybe they do it in case somebody takes an unhealthy interest in their child, so just being cautious

Wagatha Cristie.

Why bother doing that when most people give their child's dob away with a photo and happy birthday message?! Plus if they have the same surname of their parent then someone's got all the info they need.
Eg Hi Lauren, I'm a friend of your Mum, Alice, she said to pick you up from school....etc etc
Never ceases to amaze me how thick people are.

You can be friends with someone and then an incident can happen in your life like the Coldplay couple for example and somebody who is your friend can think ‘actually I could sell this photo of my friend from her facebook for a thousand pounds’.

This is a good example.

I had a colleague whose mum died in a horrible incident and one of the newspapers got a hold of some photos despite the fact she had a very locked down profile - it was one of her 30ish Facebook friends that must have given/sold them.

If people know roughly the area where you live and your kid’s uniform is eg red jumper and grey trousers/skirt then people can easily look at local school websites to identify which it is, if their intentions are nefarious. So I don’t really see the point of blurring/covering the logo. Just don’t post pictures.

It’s more why wouldn’t you. I think if people are so cautious to think photos can be sold for thousands of pounds not putting anything on social media is more sensible, myself.

I don't understand it either. Surely if it's so risky, logo uniform shouldn't exist? They walk around with it on them in public so social media isn't much different.

A digital footprint is completely different to walking around, that's the whole point.

Once that 5yo is grown, someone would be able to pull together their whole backstory using an AI scrape of available images/posts - some parents are taking small measures to make that a bit harder.