We all have an embarrassing childhood photo that we hide from anyone who comes to our house. A situation that our children may not be able to avoid because of us, because unlike our photo that is stored in the family album, theirs is published on the internet and it is difficult to delete it.
Being a parent means watching your children grow up and do all sorts of things that make us proud: their first step, the first time they ate alone, the birthday with their friends, when they learned to ride a bike and fell. Everything is cause for joy and we want the world to know it. A feeling that emerges in times when the networks are the family album.
However, the security provided by the photo collection at home is far from what applications can currently provide, where everything is known and anyone can access that content.
With the consolidation of social networks in our daily lives, there are many customs that have changed and having a child is a story to tell. Some children have not been born and already have a life in the applications with photos of their ultrasound scans, the rooms where they will sleep, the toys they will use and even profiles with their names.
This type of activity is known as sharenting and it is used for all the publication of photos and videos that parents make about their children, making their private lives public.
“Your children do not belong to you and the fathers and mothers are the guardians of their children’s information,” says Judy Benavides, head of the Seguro Viguías Internet Center in Peace Network.
A vision that is key to understand from the beginning to realize the implications that are generated when uploading a photo. risks that ESETa cybersecurity company, classifies into three types:
– Impregnation of the fingerprint: A profile is created on the internet of someone who has not yet decided to be there, regardless of whether the content has nothing wrong with it. Any photo or video that is uploaded will remain there and will form a digital trail, which means that when it grows it will be associated with accounts that you create.
– Sexual exploitation: It is not necessary for the content to have some kind of illegal character for someone unknown to take them and distribute them for that purpose. To do so, some edit the photos by taking the faces of minors or giving them to other people.
– Identity Theft: There are accounts that take the images of minors and pass them off as their children for different reasons.
Which puts two problems in the picture: on the one hand, the safety of children and. for another. your privacy. Regarding the latter, the implications can be very broad, from creating the identity of a person who does not know that this is happening, to cases of bullying or harassment.
“For example, right now the photo where the child’s runny nose may seem hilarious, but later this child will feel ashamed of that photo that someone from school received. These materials can be used for bullying or, in the future, damage the image of a professional adult due to a shameful situation that affects the free development of the personality, the right to tell their own story, if they want to do so”, says Benavides.
Situations that may be extreme, but that are real.
In Colombiain 2022, an iconic case was filed for Latin America. Through her father, a son sued her mother for posting photos of her on social networks, despite the fact that on those platforms the woman had a profile in which she sold adult content.
The father pointed out that she was engaging in “a series of irregular behaviors regarding the image and good name” of her son, for which she had to delete the content, since the minor’s face was “in view of unscrupulous people.” , who made obscene comments to him and for this reason the minor did not like to appear in his mother’s photos, although she insisted even though the images were not of a sexual nature.
The pride of being parents will never go away and social networks are a tool that allows us to transmit that feeling by counting the moments we share with them every day. But you have to do it safely.
platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp, they have options to privatize the profiles and only allow access to those who are given authorization. An alternative that should be used if the idea of the account is to upload content in which our children appear.
It is also important to think before publishing, questioning ourselves if that photo or video is really worth the world knowing and if our son in the future is going to feel good about it.
“There’s a pretty big difference between sharing a milestone like a birthday, as opposed to uploading a picture of the kid in the bathtub. We must think if that is worth it or if we just take the photo and save it. Also, think about whether that photograph might not cause our son too much embarrassment. You have to consider that at some point that child is going to grow up,” said Martina López, spokeswoman for ESET.
But you also have to think about safety as parents, because those publications can be information for cybercriminals, who look for data in the social networks to guess passwords or the location of people. Details that are usually revealed in this type of content.
For this reason, the applications have implemented security measures to protect minors. For example, Facebook and instagram are part of the platform take it downwhich allows minors under 18 years of age and their parents to regain control of the intimate content that is on the Internet, since deleting it from a profile does not guarantee that it is in the hands of other people and is sold illegally.
A scenario that needs greater legal support, especially in Latin America, where Judy Benavides sees that “we are extremely behind” and for this reason the case in Colombia is an important milestone. But beyond the laws and restrictions imposed by the applications, what is needed is to keep in mind the magnitude of the problem, because “we are still not aware of the real consequences that this generation of children will have.”
