0
0
A nice photo of a child is quickly posted on the web. At least faster than the subject can say, “Stop!”. Yet many children would do that.
“Oh, how cute,” said the parents. And three clicks later, the snapshot of the little one is online. However, kids also have a right to their image, and they frequently have concrete ideas about what they can post online. Parents should, therefore, always ask children for permission before taking a photo and, at the latest, before posting it. That’s the advice Nadia Kutscher, professor of educational assistance, gives in the magazine “Scout.”
Children have rights
It’s not a question of age: Children have rights even before they can explicitly protest, says the expert. Often, children have their own opinions very early on about which pictures make them uncomfortable. These can also be photos that parents find beautiful and entirely unproblematic. For example, Kutscher describes the case of a seven-year-old who did not want to see a picture on the Internet that showed her breastfeeding as a baby.
Privacy checks for messengers are essential.
Kutscher explains that children already have a perfect sense of different types of publicity. They distinguish, for example, between photos that they only want to share with family or their closest circle of friends and those that the whole world can see.
The right to one’s image
According to “Online Security,” minors have the right to their image, privacy, and anonymity, which they could also sue for later. This happened, for example, with an American influencer whose parents had documented her entire childhood on YouTube. There was also a similar case in Austria in 2016: here, an 18-year-old sued her parents because they had shared private photos of her on Facebook without her consent and refused to take them down, as “The Local” reports.
Pedocrime
Unauthorized posting of children’s photos can, in fact, lead to more than just family strife. The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research even warns on the website “Netzsicherheit” (network security) of pedo crimes that posting may fuel. Of course, this doesn’t mean you must ban children’s photos from social media altogether. But caution is advised! So, what can I do to protect my child?
Don’t post a photo of your child’s face
Use apps to pixelate
Share little to no information or data about your child
Alert friends and family to protect rights
Respect privacy settings
This post has already been read 1400 times!
