You know the privacy perils and what AI can do with an innocent photo. So why do you still feel the urge to post? I stopped posting photos of my son on social media almost four years ago, after my husband and I found out one of his college teammates had been charged with possessing and distributing child sexual abuse material.
While we had no reason to believe our son’s photos were part of his cache, the fact that he followed my husband on Instagram made us all too aware that our private profiles still didn’t magically make sharing our son’s image online safe. Sometimes the predator isn’t a stranger, and they already follow you. In the following days and weeks, we went back through our social media profiles, deleting the sun-drenched baby in a bear cub onesie captioned “my little sweet potato” and the family pictures at the pumpkin patch.
We texted family members and friends asking them not to share pictures of our son online either. It felt overprotective and uncomfortable to be the only people we knew with this boundary. I imagined my friends swiping through photos after getting together with our kids and being bummed they couldn’t share the cutest of the bunch because my son’s face was in it.
My friends are incredibly supportive.) The mass deletion also felt a little like erasing the fact that we’d ever had a baby at all, like maybe the happy glow around these moments and my entire matrescence wouldn’t just cease to exist in my digital footprint, but in my own memory. How would anyone know I was a mom at all, specifically a good one? Well, therein lies the motivation to post, for many parents.
Millennials are savvy tech users, and we’re well aware of the precautions we should take online. Most of us are not vlogging our kids’ daily routines to post on YouTube for profit. We’re snapping a pic of our kid’s first lost tooth and posting it on our private accounts, with no identifying information about their whereabouts, last name, or other risky privacy details.
We know what to leave out so no one can ascertain where our kids go to school, open a credit card in their name, or guess at their future passwords. But the magnitude of the risk of sharing at all has skyrocketed in the past year alone, thanks to AI, which can turn a completely innocent school photo of a child into the unthinkable. According to the Internet Watch Foundation, “realistic full-motion AI video content is now commonplace.
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