TL;DR
- A post about your child is never just one post. Over time, photos of the school uniform, the front door and the first day of school add up to where a child is and when.
- Studies show how early this starts: in a 2010 survey of 2,200 mothers in 10 countries, 81% of children under two already had an online presence, and 23% had prenatal scans posted online.
- Three risks are growing: location and routine, identity fraud, and AI – from children’s photos found in AI training data to deepfakes made from ordinary social media pictures.
- I’m not a parent, and I’m not here to judge. I work with digital communication and I see every day how easy it is to get into the internet, and how hard it is to get out.
- If you post, post with a thought first. A short checklist is at the end.
A few months ago, in a neighbourhood Facebook group, a mother posted that she was looking for someone to look after her child.
She described the job in detail. Which school the child goes to. What time school finishes. What time she finishes work. Where the child needs to be taken, and when they need to be brought home.
When I read it, I honestly felt sick. Not because she did anything with bad intentions – she was simply looking for help. But without realising it, she had published a child’s daily routine, including the hours when the child is without a parent.
Then I opened the comments. Among the people offering to help were fake profiles of different men, ready to do it for any payment, even a symbolic one.
I sent her a private message. I explained, gently, why sharing a child’s schedule online is risky. She thanked me and deleted the post.
That’s when I realised how many people simply don’t think about this. And why I wanted to make this video and write this article.
Why I care about this, even though I’m not a parent
I’m not a parent, and I don’t have the right to judge parents. But I work with digital communication, and more than once people and brands have asked me to clean their name and digital presence from things they wanted gone. Often they didn’t understand how the internet works: almost nothing can be truly deleted.
I also understand why people share. It comes from love, not from carelessness. We share engagements, pregnancies, births. I’ve followed influencers from their teenage years, and now I’m watching their children grow up online.
This is completely new for humanity. We are the first generation that lives like public figures by choice. A child doesn’t get that choice. They are born into it. Some parents even create an Instagram account for a baby that isn’t born yet.
The numbers behind it
This isn’t just a feeling. There are numbers:
- In 2010, the security company AVG surveyed 2,200 mothers in 10 countries. 81% of children under two already had an online presence, and 23% had prenatal scans posted online. Today the numbers are surely higher.
- In 2016, a study by The Parent Zone for Nominet found that the average UK parent shares 1,498 photos of their child by the child’s fifth birthday.
- In a 2018 Nominet survey, 47% of parents said they always expect other parents to ask permission before posting a picture of their child. Yet 25% admit they never ask others, and 51% never ask their own children.
We see the problem in others, but not in ourselves. Which is completely human.
What I see when I look at an ordinary post
1. Where the child is, and when
One photo shows a school uniform with a logo. Another shows the street sign or the block number. Another is the first day of school, in front of the entrance. Each one alone feels harmless. Together, over time, they say where the child is and when.
Add real-time stories from holidays, and you’re telling everyone where you are right now. Photos also often contain location data. Big social networks usually remove it, but when you send the original file by email or as a document in a chat, that information can stay.
2. Identity
To steal someone’s identity, fraudsters often need very little: a name, a date of birth, an address. Think about how much of that we share in a single birthday post.
In 2018, Barclays forecast that sharenting could account for two-thirds of identity fraud facing young people by 2030. It’s a forecast, not a measured fact. But the logic is simple: these children will grow up, open bank accounts, and the information about them will already be out there.
3. AI
In 2024, Human Rights Watch reviewed a tiny part – less than 0.0001% – of LAION-5B, one of the largest image datasets used to train AI models. Researchers found 170 photos of children from Brazil and 190 from Australia. Some had been posted under strict privacy settings that parents believed were private. Photos can be removed from a dataset, but a model already trained on them can’t simply forget.
And there’s worse. In 2023, in the Spanish town of Almendralejo, more than 20 girls received AI-generated fake nude images of themselves, made from fully clothed photos on their Instagram accounts. The humiliation and harassment from something like this can mark a person for life.
4. “Only my friends can see it”
This is the myth I’d most like to break. In practice, I’ve met very few people in Bulgaria who really know how to lock down a profile. Many fake profiles and bot farms look like real people, send friend requests and get accepted. And a real friend’s account can be hacked without them noticing for years.
Today there are also apps that can identify a person from a photo of their face and show what’s publicly available about them. No previous generation grew up with their whole life public, from the prenatal scan to graduation. Today’s children are the first. We don’t yet know what this will mean for them at 30.
The law is behind, so the decision is ours
Some countries are starting to react. In France, a law adopted in February 2024 makes both parents jointly responsible for protecting the child’s right to their own image, and says children should be involved according to their age and maturity. If the parents disagree, a judge can forbid one of them from publishing.
In Bulgaria, under the Personal Data Protection Act, consent for online services for a child under 14 must come from a parent. But laws are only a framework. The decision about one specific photo is always ours.
Before you post: my checklist
I’m not saying “never post”. I’m saying: post with a thought first.
- Ask yourself: would I want someone to post this photo of me at this age, without asking me?
- Never share routines: school, training, schedules, addresses. If you need to, send them privately to someone you know is really behind the profile.
- Check the background: logos, street signs, block numbers, car plates.
- Post with a delay: the beach photo can wait until you’re home.
- Skip the intimate moments: bath time, nudity, embarrassing moments. Even pool photos. They’re cute to us, but can be painful for the child years later, or seen very differently by others.
- Think about who sees it: a closed profile and a close-friends list help only if you really know how to set them up. Don’t use a public profile for this. And anyone can take a screenshot.
- Ask the child, when they’re old enough. It’s the best privacy lesson you can give them.
- Talk to relatives: grandparents and friends often post more than parents do.
If something is already out there, don’t panic. Review old posts and archive or delete the ones you’re unsure about. Check public albums, groups and other sites. Report a photo of your child that appears where it shouldn’t. In Bulgaria, the National Safer Internet Centre runs an anonymous helpline on 124 123.
I post too. I’m part of the generation that shares everything. That’s exactly why I want to pass on what we’ve learned, so the next generation can do better than us.
The mother from the neighbourhood group fixed her post in a minute, only because one person told her what to keep in mind. If this article made you stop and think, send it to someone who should read it. Not as a reproach, but as the message they needed.
I hope our children will grow up in a better world, and decide for themselves what they want the world to know about them.
This article is based on my video (in Bulgarian) about children’s digital footprint. For a neutral explainer with the data and rules, read Sharenting, Explained on Egorithms.
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