As a parent to young children, you can feel like you’re fighting several battles at the same time when it comes to keeping your little ones secure.
Whether its problems at school, their health, teaching them things like how to cross the road safely and to always be aware of stranger danger, there are always several issues at the forefront of every parents mind.
Which is why something like witnessing photos of your children stolen from your own social media account and used for nefarious purposes can really catch any parent completely off guard.
This is exactly what happened to Brittany Champagne recently. To her horror, she stumbled across photos of her own children – aged 8 years and 9 months – used on fake Instagram profiles that were advertising pornography websites.
The photos were stolen from an old Facebook account belonging to Brittany, and then re-uploaded by an anonymous user to Instagram. The photos has several pornography related hashtags associated with them and also linked to porn sites. Upon further digging, Brittany discovered the photos on those porn sites as well.
Speaking to Yahoo Parenting, Brittany said…
While I was scrolling to find people I might know, I found someone who had a picture of my daughter as her profile picture… …I found out after this happened that my pictures weren’t as private as I thought they were, I guess my settings weren’t right
It appears spammers could access the photos on her old Facebook account because they did not have the correct privacy settings applied, allowing them to be accessed and stolen. We reiterate many times on this site about the importance of ensuring your Facebook account is locked down sufficiently, and you can read our Facebook privacy guide on how to achieve this here.
But this incident begs the question – can you keep photos of your children 100% secure on the Internet, or more specifically on sites like Facebook?
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The answer, from a technical standpoint at least, is no. Whilst you can do plenty to safeguard your photos (including following the privacy advice on the aforementioned link) you always run the risk of having them falling into the wrong hands because you rely not only on the privacy mechanisms of sites like Facebook working as they should, but you also rely on your own social media friends acting responsibly as well.
Take for example Facebook. We recommend restricting access to any photos or updates you make to friends only. Even if your friends list is compiled of only people that you trust, it only takes one friend to fall for a scam online that results in their account getting compromised.
If a stranger manages to gain access to that friends account, they can see photos you upload that were only intended for friends. From there they can create copies of your photos and upload them elsewhere on the Internet.
Ultimately, like many things, your decision about whether to upload photos of your children on sites like Facebook should be based on assessing the risk versus reward. It is comparatively rare for someone with appropriate privacy settings to have their photos stolen, but it can and does happen.
It is important for parents to be aware of the risks involved, and at the same time to be aware of everything they can do to lessen that risk. This way parents can make informed decisions to ensure they are not caught unaware, like with the case of Brittany Champagne.
Would you upload photos of your children to sites like Facebook? Let us know below.
