Hello there,
I have recently separated and as I was the primary carer for my children for the last 6 years I want to make sure they are still fully protected and not exposed to being unwillingly appearing online.
My ex-wife keeps them pending a court decision but she is into social media A LOT. I am not and we always agreed the children should be kept off it until they can decide for themselves.
However, I have now found out that my ex-wife's company, which is quite well known, has re-posted a picture of my children on their social media account with their age and name to promote their business and my ex-wife career.
The context is the following: Apparently my ex-wife had a presentation within the company about being a working mum (well, that's the first lie) with a story to tell during that conference. Then, someone on the board of the company posted the slide of the presentation with the 3 mums involved in the talk and a little summary about their family including picture of the children, age and names. This, to show how such a great employee and mum she is and, since the company re-posted it publicly to their millions of followers, how great the company is because of great people like her.
So 1st, it seems it was an internal document that is now in the open.
2nd, even though it was internal, I strongly ethically oppose to anyone using the picture of my children to promote their career or business.
3rd As I am not on social media, I am also told now that for years she put pictures of them and me on her FB page etc (I never go on them and never checked before as I trusted her) without informing me.
What should I do? The company is big, it is well talked about in the media at the moment as one of the next big IT companies, they posted the picture on their LinkedIn account and couldn't ignore what they were doing. 100K of people liked it including my ex-wife.
The kids (4 and 6) have of course no idea how they are being used or exposed.
I was thinking different options (but I'll have to create an account on LinkedIn):
- Privately send a message to the company and the executive who posted it in first place to ask them to remove it and wait to see
- on top of that I could publicly tell them (on LinkedIn and Twitter) I find it unethical to use the picture of children to promote their business. But if I do that, it might be pick-up by some journalists to make a story, which could have the opposite effect of what was intended unless there is no mention of the specific post and just a general statement.
What should I do. I have to say I am a bit annoyed that I have always cared for them, doing all the school trip and attendance as well as homework and outings on the week-end when my ex-wife was partying in NYC, LV, Berlin or Paris in her sooo cool company to the point the children kept telling me "We want mummy to bring us to school because it is always you".
So, now, I realised she has never put the kids interest before hers whatever it implies.
In fact, am I fully entitled to request the picture and post to be taken off since she might have agreed as she "liked" the post.
Thanks