Kristi McVee (00:00)
Hey Kristi, how bad is it really to post photos of my kids online? My husband is completely against it. He works in education and sees the worst of it, but I like sharing pics sometimes. Okay, hands up if this is a conversation that has happened in your house, because I can guarantee it has happened in thousands of households across Australia this week alone, and it's starting to become one that we're having more of.
β One parent wants to share the gorgeous shot of their kid at the beach, the other one is quietly horrified. We have friends who are against it, friends who aren't. And you know, somewhere in the middle, there's a child who has absolutely no idea their photo is the subject of a negotiation or a conversation or maybe judgment, because there is a lot of judgment going on around this. So let's talk about it properly. You're listening to Ask Kristi, where the questions are real, the answers are honest, and we don't shy away from the stuff that actually keeps parents up at night.
I'm Kristi McVee. I spent a decade with the West Australian Police, nearly six years of that as a detective specializing in child sexual abuse investigations. These days I work with parents, educators, and communities across Australia helping them understand how to protect kids in a world that's moving faster than most of us can keep up with. Every episode I take one question straight from parents just like you, and I give you my honest take. Today we're talking about sharenting. That's the term for sharing your children's images online and whether it's actually as risky as some people say.
Before I dive in, I want to acknowledge something. Both of these parents are coming from a completely reasonable place. The mum who wants to share photos, she's not being reckless. She's just proud of her kids. She wants to connect with family and friends. She wants to capture and celebrate moments. That is completely human and instinctive. It's also what we've been conditioned to do in the last 20 years since the conception of social media and Facebook. The dad who works in education and sees the worst of it. He's not being paranoid. He has context that most people don't.
When you work in a space where you regularly see how images of children are misused, your risk tolerance drops fast. I mean, I can relate because I stopped sharing photos of my daughter online years ago. And that context is valid too. So this isn't about who's right and who's wrong. It's about making an informed decision together. And you can't make an informed decision without understanding what the actual risks are.
So, what are the actual risks? Let me break this down because it's dangerous, it's not specific enough to be useful. Risk one image harvesting. This is exactly what it sounds like. Photos that are publicly posted or even semi publicly posted on accounts with large following or loose privacy settings can be downloaded, saved, and shared without your knowledge. Child exploitation material investigators will tell you, and I saw it in person, that a significant proportion of images found in collections online are not taken by
offenders. They're harvested from social media. Ordinary family photos, beach photos, bar photos, sports photos taken completely out of context and used in ways that would make would make most parents physically ill. I had a child sex offender, a registered child sex offender, say to me that it's not illegal to be a creep when I asked him why he had so many photos of children he had never met, that he'd, you know, harvested from online.
And you know, they do use these things to you know, make themselves they do use this stuff. I'm I'm not going to lie. A lot of them harvest it, collect it, keep it on their devices. And so sometimes, for me it was like a no-brainer. If someone some random person is going to collect my daughter's image and use it for their own sick purposes, why would I want them to have access to that?
Risk two, digital footprint and future consent. Every photo you post of your child becomes part of their permanent digital identity. Often before they're old enough to have any say in that. I had an eight-year-old once come to me during a presentation where I was talking about online safety, but when I used to do it in schools, and say to me, How do I stop my mum from posting photos? I don't want her to do that. Because I was talking about stranger danger, right? I'm just talking about online stranger danger. And he was like,
But my mum posts photos and I don't know who she's sharing those photos with, an eight-year-old. So our kids have more, you know, are more aware and have a lot more need a lot more consideration than what we give them sometimes. That photo of the three-year-old in the bath that felt cute and innocent. In 15 years, when your child is 18, that image still exists somewhere. They didn't consent to it being posted. They can't unpost it. And this is something a lot of parents don't think about when
Until their kids are old enough to be mortified or old enough to ask why. And again, we didn't know what we didn't know back in the early days, right? We 2006, 7 when Facebook became a thing, we all shared stuff that we probably shouldn't have shared. We all talked about things we shouldn't have talked about. And over the years it's kind of become the normal with YouTube channels and family β charanting. And you know, we've just become everything that we do is shared online. And
It's, you know, this pretty picture that we want people to see. And now we've got kids who are like, Why would I want you to you shared my most intimate moments with other people and I don't know who they are and why would you do that? I think that we know better now, we should be doing better. Risk three, location and routine disclosure. This one is less talked about, but genuinely important. When you post regularly.
Photos of your kids at their school, at their sports grounds, at their playground, around the corner from your house, you're inadvertently building a publicly accessible map of your child's life, their routine, their school, their face, their name. For most families, most of the time, nothing comes of this, but for the small amount of situations where it does, it matters enormously. There are situations in Australia where children have been stalked by someone who follows their parents or their their platform.
has have approached children. I actually know of multiple celebrities that have had their children approached by random strangers. And this is not really okay, right? These are kids. They shouldn't even be exposed to this. We wouldn't allow it anywhere else. But yet we share their lives online and then you know they become public property. Risk four is metadata. Some photos taken on smartphones embed location data in your image file themselves. Depending on your settings and the platform you're posting to the metadata can be accessible to others.
most major platforms trip this now, but it's worth knowing. It's also worth knowing that the you know your locations can be also found in the metadata. So unless you turn off location settings, you can actually β people can use an image, reverse engineer that to find the metadata or the the location.
the geolocation and find out where the longitude and latitude of a photo was taken and if it's in their home or if it's in a place that they're regularly visiting, they can literally find out where that is without you even talking about it. So there's there's a lot of things that we didn't know we didn't and we don't know. So what do you actually do? And I I think also before I move on, because I've got some points here and I before I move on, let's like talk about AI. Because we've seen now that
Predators, offenders, it's been happening for the last couple of years, but they're creating child exploitation material from our children's photos. They can take a few photos from your social media and turn it into child abuse material, turn it into a video that looks like real life of your child being sexually abused by someone. And with the the child doesn't even have to have no clothes on, they just need to have a clear image of their face. I don't know what the
The lifelong impacts of this will be, but how devastating would that be to your child that the photos you post then be then are turned into child abuse material that could be on a platform and be around for the rest of their lives? Like for me, it's a no-brainer that AI is also, being used to create child abuse material. Not only that, AI is being used to β scam, exploit, and abuse children.
And parents. So it's just yeah, we can't keep we can't keep posting with these risks about β you know, and I am going to talk about what we can do, how we can post semi safely and hopefully, you know, as a family you can make a choice as a family. So here's my practical take, and I'm not gonna tell you never to post a photo of your child because I think that's unrealistic to ask for most families and it's not actually the point.
The point is conscious informed decision making. I still personally post photos of my daughter online. She's now over the age of 18. I always ask for consent to take a photo. And I always ask for consent if she minds if I share the photo. She always looks at the photo and goes, Yep, I'm happy for you to post that to your 300 Facebook friends. and I have the thing called the dinner table rule. The dinner table rule is if
Someone wouldn't come and sit at my dinner table and have dinner with my family, literally sitting in person with me. Why would I share a photo of my child with them? She doesn't get a choice of who I am friends with. That's another thing that this little boy was like, I didn't, I don't know who these people are. I don't, they're not my friends. And you know, how can we sit there and authentically tell them not to make friends with strangers yet we're posting photos of our kids to strangers?
That's what I've decided and I think that's a really safe way to do that. We can't control what those 300 friends or thousand friends do with that photo, and that's why you need to have a look at who who's following you, who's who's your friends online.
β So the first question I would ask myself is, is my account private? If you're sharing photos of your kids, your account should be private, full stop. A public account means anyone and I mean anyone can see, save, and share your kid content, and your kids are not content. β if you're sharing photos of your kids to public, who are you sharing them for? Like these are your children, you're meant to be protecting them. So who are you sharing them for?
Two, would I be comfortable if a stranger could see this? So that's another question I'd be asking, because on a public account they can, and even on a private account, you don't always know every person who follows you. Most parents have people on their account that they don't really know. You know, that it was very normalized a few years ago to just add every friend. Go on cull and check the people on that list. Because really, why are we sharing our lives with people who don't really know us?
I think it some everyone gets to a point where we're like, who the hell are these people and why are they on our Facebook? But you β if you haven't got there yet, just have a real think about why or your Instagram or your Snapchat or whatever you're using, have a real hard think about why these people have access to your life. Because if they're not true friends, they should or family, they shouldn't. And
The third thing I would be asking is: does this image reveal identifying information like school uniform, school names visible in the background, suburb names, sports club logos, all of these things that build a picture of your child's world or your life? You know, they're not important to anyone else but you. And number four is: is my child identifiable and are they in a vulnerable position? A photo of a fully clothed child laughing at a birthday party is very different to a photo of your child.
in their swimmers or getting out of the bath. β both might feel innocent to you and they look innocent to you, but think of about who else is looking. Like I said, I had a child sex offender say it's not illegal to be a creep and to have these photos of kids online. And he's very real. Like honestly, it's true. Like as a detective and as an registered sex offender, there is nothing illegal about having photos of kids on his device.
As long as they weren't unclothed or β you know, abuse material. Question five, would my child be okay with this photo existing online? start by asking this question early. Even with young children, you can begin building the habit of checking in. Can I take a photo of you? Is it okay if I share it? Because you're modeling consent and when they're old enough to have an opinion, you should honor it. Our kids go through phases of not wanting photos and whatever. You know, you can still ask and you don't take it just because.
The other thing is this that when we model consent to our kids, they will model it to others. And when someone does something that doesn't model consent, they will tell you about it. They'll pull it up and they will say, Hey, it's not okay if you share my photo online. And I saw that happen in action with my daughter. She did that a lot with her friends. And you know, sometimes she didn't care, sometimes she did. β it's something to consider with regards to,
β your kids and just what you're teaching them about online on online safety.
Probably the other thing I want to bring attention to is that too many of us are very comfortable with sharing our our laundry, so to speak, our y your child's tantrum, your child's personal problems, your child's life and what they're struggling with. And I'm not saying you shouldn't. What I'm saying is is consider what you're disclosing and where. It can be used against you.
In β family court it can be used against you with arguments with family it can be used against you and also it's intimate information that shouldn't be shared with anyone because it's your child's information, it's your child's life. I just think we've been become way too comfortable with sharing stuff that's not something we should be sharing. And it's because it's been we've been groomed and conditioned to believe that this stuff is okay to share and normal and you know it makes us feel connected. But really
you can you can do some of this stuff without actually sharing it and β you have to have a consideration to your child and what you're doing. Okay, I want to circle back to the dad in this question because I think his instinct deserves some weight. When someone works in a field like education, like policing or any of these fields, what they see regularly
they see the consequences of these decisions. So that's not paranoia. That's informed risk assessment. And while I'm not saying you need to never share a photo of your kids again, I am saying that his concern is worth sitting with rather than dismissing. He has a right to feel the way he feels. And so does she. β you gotta ask, I think in this in this situation, you've got to ask yourself the question: who are you sharing photos for and why does it make you feel good? Of course your children are beautiful, of course you're proud of them.
But you can do it safely. So have a genuine conversation. Agree on some shared guidelines. Maybe that looks like a private account only. No school uniforms, no location tags, no images where your child is in a state of undress. Whatever you land on, you know, land on it together and make it a conscious decision rather than a habit, rather than, I want to share this because it makes me feel good. Because it's not about us, it's about our kids and their safety.
This stuff matters, not because danger lurks behind every post, it doesn't, but because our kids deserve parents who are making active informed choices about their digital life, not just going through the motions, not just doing it unconsciously, because that's what we have really got good at is being unconscious and letting social media, online safety, the things that are happening around us, we've been become really good at just dismissing those things. So if today's episode got you thinking that's good.
Share it with the parents in your life. We need to hear it. And if you've got a question you want me to tackle on Ask Kristi, find me at kristimcvee.com or slide into my DMs at on my Instagram @KristiMcVee I'm Kristi McVee and this is Ask Kristi where we have conversations that matter most. So until next time, see you later.
