Stop And Consider The Risks Before Posting Your Child’s Back-To-School Photo

Originally Published Sep. 25, 2023.

You might want to think twice about posting a back-to-school picture of your child online.

Parents might unknowingly be putting their children at risk by following the social media trend. Online safety experts say these innocent pictures can be used maliciously by scammers and predators, HuffPost reported.

The back-to-school post trend sometimes includes images with details like the name of a school, a teacher’s name, a child’s birthday, and more. If you don’t want someone showing up to your child’s school unannounced, you might want to hold back on sharing these details. The Director of Privacy Innovation at Norton, Iskander Sanchez-Rola, warned that “anyone can know where your child is a majority of the day, Monday through Friday.” That’s a scary thought for any parent.

The director told HuffPost, “Scammers can also easily identify a child by searching their full name or reverse image searching a photo of their face shared online.” The director added, “If your child is old enough to have social media like Facebook or Instagram, cybercriminals can use their name and image to find their account and directly contact them.”

Google’s Help page explains that a reverse image search works like searching for a word or phrase. The page explains what you can expect to find when you drag and drop an image in Google’s search bar: “Search results for objects in the image, similar images, and websites with the image or a similar image.”

HuffPost also noted that a photo of your young child or teenager might cause problems in their social circles as they age. Just because you think it’s cute doesn’t mean your child will when they get older.

“Lots of kids worry that their friends or schoolmates could see embarrassing posts of them online, and what may be a silly photo or video to you may seem very embarrassing to them,” Kaitlin Allair Tiches, a research librarian with the Boston Children’s Digital Wellness Lab said.