In the Independent today: CyberSafeIreland CEO, Alex Cooney, warns about sharing back-to-school photos of our kids on social media.
It’s hard to know where to draw the line here, but I’d suggest these areas of caution if you are going to post pictures of your kids:
Social media photo posting tips
- Try to make sure that there is nothing valuable in the background of the picture.
- Try to keep any visually identifiable location information out of the picture.
- Make sure that when you take the picture, location services are off on your phone/camera. Check that location information is not stored in the EXIF data.
- Your location isn’t always given away by the one photo, but by older photos on your timeline. It is not difficult to correlate location. Review your timeline!
- Make sure that you ONLY share with genuine friends, and not publicly.
- e.g. on Facebook, make sure that the people on your friends list are people you really know and trust.
- Ensure that you select to share it only with “friends” or “Specific Friends” and definitely not publicly.
- Never post it on Twitter (unless you have your account set to Private), on Snapchat stories/map, on Instagram (unless the account is set to private) etc etc.
- If the child is old enough to understand, ask them if it ok to share their back-to-school photo with your friends. This photo may well exist in an internet cache for the rest of their lives, regardless of whether you remove it from your timeline.
It is really sad that we have to be so cautious because of a few bad people. Sadly, even in our little village, we hear alerts every now and again about people trying to pick up kids. Publicly posting of our photos of them is just advertising choice for the depraved minority.
For more social media tips, click here
If you need a bit more advice about social media safety, contact James at DeGeekIT on 086 3804373 or book a lesson with us here:
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