No pictures, please!

A new survey finds that while many of us claim to be concerned about our privacy online, we clearly aren’t that concerned about the privacy of our little children.

Before they are even born, more than one third of children in the U.S. have an online presence.  And by the time they are two-years-old, nearly all of them will have left their digital footprints on the Internet.

The survey, conducted by the Internet security company AVG, involved 2,200 mothers from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Australia/New Zealand and Japan.  When asked about their Internet habits as it relates to uploading images of their children, American mothers were found to be among the most willing to put their kids out there:

• 34% said they had posted their unborn child’s ultrasound image online,
• 33% posted images of their newborn baby online,
• 7% gave their baby an email address,
• 6% gave their baby a social networking profile.

While those numbers are pretty amazing, the most surprising statistic is this one:  92% of American mothers surveyed said they had posted photos of their children under the age of two online.

92%!  That means that the majority of our children will some day grow up and find images of themselves as babies on the Internet.  And because all this uploading and sharing isn’t likely to stop on baby’s second birthday, many of them will be able to read their entire life stories – at least in pictures – on the Internet.

As AVG Chief Executive J.R. Smith says, the desire to post pictures of your kids is totally understandable.  But parents would do well to consider the future and bear in mind that what lives on the Internet lives forever. You aren’t just sharing your pride and joy with your immediate friends and family, you are “creating a digital history for a human being that will follow him or her for the rest of their life.”

AVG offers the following advice on how to best minimize your child’s digital footprint:

1. Periodically educate yourself and update privacy settings: It’s critical to share information about your children with only with those who you know and trust. To ensure this, you must regularly update your privacy settings as social networks often change their privacy controls.
2. Protect your Tweets: Know who you are adding to ensure you’re sharing information with people you trust. Regularly update your Twitter settings so that only those who you have approved can follow you and the information you are tweeting.
3. Make Sure it is YouTube not EveryoneTube: Keep your YouTube channel private, so that everyone doesn’t have access to its content. You can also use the new ‘unlisted’ option so your videos will not be tagged for public viewing and can only be found using a specific URL.
4. Facebook not Baby Book: Segment who can see your status or wall posts so that if you happen to comment about your child it’s only your close friends and family members that can see the posts.

That’s all well and good, but it’s worth remembering that no matter what you do, an image posted online is but a right-click away from being completely out of your control.  Does this give you pause?  It does me.

Image: PinkSherbet/Flickr

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