How to safely share back-to-school photos of your kids

As children return to the classroom this week, social media feeds are set to become inundated with adorable first-day-of-school photos. 

Online safety experts, however, are reminding parents that it is critical to think about what they share on social media.

Kara Brisson-Boivin, director of research at MediaSmarts, a Canadian media literacy organization, says that while posting photos of children can be a positive part of parenting, it is important to have conversations about consent with your children. 

Brisson-Boivin spoke to Stephen Quinn on CBC's The Early Edition.

This file has been edited for length and clarity.privac

How much do you think the conversation has changed around privacy and posting pictures of your children on social media?

The culture has evolved so much that we actually have a key term to describe this kind of behaviour — we call it "sharenting." This idea of sharing our parenting journey. 

It can have great benefits in terms of building a community of other parents and spreading positivity. But it also comes with great challenges as well, in terms of privacy and consent issues, especially for youth and children.

When you are educating families about the impact a digital footprint can have on their kids in the long term, what tends to surprise parents the most? 

There is a misconception and stereotype that continues to persist that because young people are active in digital spaces, they don't care about their privacy. And that is just blatantly false. 

They are well aware of when they think their privacy is being abused, but they often feel constrained in their capacity to deal with that. 

It can be difficult to have conversations about privacy and consent. We often try to support families in having those conversations. Before you post a picture, even of a child as young as four, you can have a conversation about how you're posting it — where and why —  to really demonstrate healthy consent practices. 

Also keep in mind, something a child thought was cute and funny when they were five may no longer be when they're 12. We have to keep revisiting consent. 

The urge to post, it's very real. There are so many moments that parents want to share. What is your advice to parents on how to do that with some safety checks in place?

One of the ways that young people themselves mitigate privacy is through managing audiences. One of the things we do in my family is we have very specific privacy settings on posts. We have a group that's just very close family and friends. 

That said, we still have to be cognizant of the fact that sharing any data on these platforms, while we can control perhaps some of the audience settings, it still has a life beyond the groups and the folks that we're sharing it with. 

I would also say review privacy policies and terms of service. I recognize they are very difficult and dense documents. We at mediasmarts.ca have tools and resources to help families navigate those. 

As you said, even if parents do have their own rules about posting pictures, once you share a photo with the family group, it's out of your control. How do you suggest you talk to family members about how you wouldn't want to share that photograph? 

One of the things that we've done, for example, with our family group is we've made it very clear and explicit at the top of the page that this is content for this group. If you want a picture for your own purposes, please ask us first. 

And the other thing is — and young people find this to be a very productive strategy themselves — when you see something that's been posted online that you didn't consent to or that you want taken down, have a conversation with someone you know offline or a private message. 

Our research has shown that for young people that interpersonal approach seems to be the best way to kind of navigate and mitigate those kinds of challenges.