Parents need to smarten up their online privacy game to protect images of their children being taken by paedophiles, experts say.
Police in Germany recently warned parents not to post any pictures of their children online to protect their images from being stolen.
Australia's , Alistair MacGibbon, said criminals were sweeping the internet and social media on a large scale searching for images of young children.
“They then categorise them and upload them to these photo sharing sites, which in itself seems quite innocuous until you see what the sex offenders do in this instance,” he told SBS News.
“The images become part of the sexual fantasies for these guys.
“There’ll be an image of a young school girl doing homework or playing in the park and there’ll be a whole heap of comments that are added to the bottom of the photograph about what they’d like to do to that child; which aspects of the child they find attractive; parts of the fantasies they’re dreaming about.”
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Commissioner MacGibbon said once the images ended up on the websites they were often edited in such a way that made them “unclassifiable”, or pornographic.
“In the last three months for example we carried out close to 2500 investigations, all of whom [on] were offshore websites that had to be taken down,” he said.
“We’re not saying to parents ‘Don’t post photographs’.
“The fact is the tools are available to parents today to change the privacy settings on all those social media services.”
Byron Bay mother Marion Rose was one parent who fell victim to online photo thieves.
She posted a photograph of her two sleeping children on her business website.
About six months later a friend showed her the photograph had been used in a Sunshine Coast newspaper without her consent – and she found out that wasn’t the only place.
“It had been used in many, many places – as advertising for companies, on people’s blog posts,” Dr Rose told SBS.
“There were about 100 places where it was being used.
“I was really shocked and distressed. I wrote to the newspaper several times and did not hear back from them.”
Dr Rose said the fact her two children, who were very young in the photograph, were asleep made it even more distressing that it was being used so widely.
She said she had since placed copyright warnings on her website and encouraged other parents to tighten up their privacy settings to protect their children’s images.
said the danger of “sharenting” – parents who shared copious pictures and videos of their children online – was a new problem for parents to deal with.
“We’ve got no frame of reference for this,” she told SBS News.
“Unlike other parenting conundrums like toilet training and kids who talk back, our parents didn’t have to deal with it – we can’t even cast our minds back to our own childhood.”
Dr Goodwin said when she did seminars and information evenings, typically only 20 or 30 per cent of parents understood privacy settings.
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She said very few parents understood that once they posted a picture to social media they had lost control of it forever.
“It’s a huge monumental task for parents to keep abreast of it, but they have to,” Dr Goodwin said.
“It’s not just naked-in-the-bath photos and children in swimmers that are being taken.
“They’re often very innocent and these images are ending up on other sites and being edited.”
Dr Goodwin said she and her husband had agreed to a media management policy as to what pictures of their children would be posted online and how often.
She also advocated for parents to check whether their children, once they were old enough, were happy for pictures of them to be posted online.
How to protect your children online:
- Make sure your privacy settings are secure on all social media. Double check the settings regularly.
- Agree to a media management policy with your partner about what you will and will not post. Check with them before you post something.
- Remember that once images and videos are posted to social media you have lost control of them forever.
- Implement permission to post: when your children get old enough, ask them each time before posting something – they may not always be happy for you to post about them on social media.
- Set up cloud or drop box accounts if you would like to share images with specific people to reduce the exposure of the pictures.
- Always remember online images last forever and will form part of your child’s permanent digital footprint.
