Study warns parents of oversharing photos of their children online
A new study, commissioned by Nominet for its online safety campaign knowthenet, has found that, on average, parents post 200 photos of their children every year to social media accounts, despite not checking the privacy settings of their social medias.
The study was conducted by The Parent Zone, an online safety site, and asked 2,000 parents how and where they chose to share photos of their children online, as well as finding out just how much they knew when it came to information being captured on devices when they snapped a photo.
The results showed that, on average, 973 photos of children are posted online by their parents before the time the child turns five, with a mere 17 per cent of those parents checking their privacy settings on Facebook and other social media, and almost half only checking once or twice.
Out of the 70 per cent of parents that said they took photos with their smartphones, less than half were aware that location data showing where the photos were taken could be stored.
When asked about photo ownership, 39 per cent of the parents polled believed they owned all rights to the images that they posted on Facebook, with 17 per cent thinking the same for Instagram, and over half polled admitting to having uploaded a photo of a child that wasn’t their own.
Nominet CEO, Russell Haworth says, “We all love to share those precious moments in our children’s lives with friends and family and sites like Facebook have made it easier than ever. While the web helps relatives to keep in touch and participate in our everyday lives, it also has the potential to lead to accidental oversharing. It’s important to ensure that the correct privacy settings are in place to safeguard our personal information and content.”