Copyright 2025, Steve Burgess

Yes, social media is fun. It helps to keep us in touch and stay in relationship with friends and loved ones. Even folks you haven’t seen or heard from in decades. And, as we all know, our kids are the most beautiful, creative, intelligent beings on the planet. And our grandkids even moreso!

So, of course, why wouldn’t we want to post pictures of these precious beings on our social media and to spread the joy we know of our progeny?

Unfortunately, there’s an answer as to why not. Even though the overwhelming majority of people are kind and caring, maybe one in a thousand is not. There are close to 6 billion people using the Internet. Do the math and even though it’s rare, that’s still a lot of crazies, and distance makes little difference in accessibility on the World Wide Web. And even though only a fraction of those are online predators, child safety advocates estimate there are about a half million predators online daily.

And now that I’ve ruined your day, here’s what’s worse (don’t’ worry, I’ll have some safety tips later).

Posting pictures often reveals background information, like addresses or environments. Certainly, posting pictures of birthday parties exposes birthdates. These are the kinds of things that open kids up to identity theft.

There are almost-free programs and apps that anyone can download to easily create deepfakes of pretty much anyone they have a photo of.

And worse, some of these are “nudifier” apps, that can take a picture and generate a nude image of the subject. While it may be illegal to post such photos, it’s legal to sell these kinds of apps, and there are nearly a hundred of them at this point in time.

Furthermore, if someone doesn’t post such images, they can still keep them to obsess over. Like I said, the sickos are rare, but they exist.

Posting on something like FaceBook or Instagram, even if it’s just to your friend or family group, doesn’t in any way guarantee that someone in that group won’t innocently post the pictures themselves. Or have their account scraped by the daily fake friend requesters.

When you broadcast on social media, you may inadvertently be broadcasting to The World. And The World includes some of those crazies.

So, what to do?

There are a couple of simple ways to protect your kids from people stealing, sharing, and altering likenesses of your kids.

One way is to keep pictures of your kids and grandkids, especially the smallest ones, offline. You can retroactively do so, by combing through your own social media accounts and removing them.

Also, it can be pretty safe to share your family and birthday pictures privately. Many messaging apps are encrypted end-to-end, so that may be one of the best ways to send them just to your family members or groups.

As a digital forensic practitioner, it’s sad when we have to investigate these kinds of cases as a part of our work.

So, keep your kids safe and keep their pictures offline. The Internet is not private.