Think before you share – Cybersafe Ireland

Cybersafe Ireland explains that it’s not just kids who need to think before they share…..

In the park today, I watched some young kids huddle over a house they had built for ladybirds out of leaves and flower petals, chatting away and giggling over some shared joke. Their mothers sat close to me, making the most of a rare few minutes of peace and quiet to catch up on each other’s news. It was a picture perfect scene – one of those precious life affirming moments that immediately makes one forget the arguments over homework, the sulks and tantrums and the times that you turn into ‘cross mammy’ because you’re late again and nobody is listening or putting on their shoes like you asked them to five minutes ago. It was obviously one of those perfect moments because one of the mums whipped out her phone, took a few photos, selected the best one and immediately posted it on Facebook.

It’s a natural instinct really. You made these wonderful little human beings, and you want to share their best moments with the world. So you post that photo on your social media page or attach in a group chat and sit back and enjoy the validation that slowly feeds back in the form of likes, smiley faces and appreciative or amusing comments from friends and family.

The Internet enables us to stay in touch in a way that we could never do before. Unfortunately it also potentially allows complete strangers access to our private lives and those of our kids. If we passed a creepy looking stranger on the street, would we offer to hand over some photos or videos of our kids? Of course not, yet many of us potentially do it online without thinking. A study by Nominet (the UK Internet domain registry) in 2015 revealed that the average parent posts nearly a thousand photos of their child online by their fifth birthday, although the majority don’t check privacy settings regularly.

But maybe you have enabled privacy settings on your social media or chat account. It’s definitely a good idea to do this in order to restrict your content so that only those on your friends list can see it. Now let’s consider this friends list. Can you honestly say that you know everyone on it well in real life? Or that if you really think about it, you would chose to share photos or personal information about your kids with every single one of them? Even with maximum privacy settings or in private chat groups, are we sharing too much? As we say to primary school children over and over again, once you share a photo with even one person, you lose control over that photo. From the moment you tap to send, someone else gets to decide what happens with it and with whom it gets shared.

Coming from a cybercrime investigation background, I am particularly conscious of how easy it is to build up a profile of someone through tiny pockets of information about them on the Internet. It’s usually a case of joining the dots, a picture of a child in their school uniform here, a reference to their birthday celebrations in comments elsewhere.

And do we think enough about our children’s right to privacy? When our kids reach their teens, or beyond, will they appreciate the moments that we have documented for eternity, or will they see it as a huge invasion of their private lives? Today’s generation of parents have in most cases been able to escape their teens unscathed. Those cringe worthy moments we all remember at one time or another remain for the most part unrecorded. No such luck for kids and teenagers today.

There is also a darker side to the Internet that we cannot ignore. There have been various reports in recent years about young Irish girls whose everyday photos have been collected from social media pages and ended up on pornographic websites, often accompanied by lewd comments or personal information about the girls. Or the mum who built up a large following on YouTube and discovered that many of the videos featuring her children in nappies had been embedded in child abuse websites. The French police recently went so far as to issue a warning to parents advising them not to share any photos of their children on social media.

The Internet presents wonderful opportunities for families and friends to keep in touch. But as parents, we need to ensure that we understand the environment and know the risks before we can make our own judgements on what is good for our kids, just as we would with any other aspect of parenting. At a minimum, enable privacy settings and review who is on your friends’ lists. Think about how your child may feel about photos that you share many years from now and what their digital footprint will say about them to future friends, universities and employers. The next time you record that precious moment, consider carefully who else gets to share it with you, and what your child might say about it given half a chance.

Cliona Curley worked in law enforcement in the UK for many years, specialising in cybercrime investigation. She is Programme Director of CyberSafeIreland, a not for profit organisation that delivers online safety education to primary school children and their parents. To find out more, visit www.cybersafeireland.org; @CyberSafeIE; www.facebook.com/cybersafeireland.