So recently, I read a pretty weird and somewhat disturbing news article about people who perform "virtual kidnapping" or "digital kidnapping" on other parent's photographs of their children. The pictures are all found on social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram where the parents will post pictures on accounts without actively keeping their privacy settings at a safe level. By not using privacy settings to keep strangers off their accounts, parents are allowing everyone who is interested access to all their posts, pictures, and other information that should be private and protected.
One mother was notified one day that her 18 month year old son's picture had been liked by a stranger. She then noticed that the stranger had not only liked the picture but was using the photograph as her homepage picture. There were also posts on the stranger's wall sharing with their friends 'information' about the baby such as how old he was, when he would start teething, and other comments. The stranger was pretending that the baby was her baby! Luckily, this stranger turned out to be a 16 year old who happened to think the red head was cute for its red hair. Still, I really wonder what would compel a 16 year old girl to think it was a good idea to role play being another child's mother and why her friends and family would think nothing of this incident.
The disturbing part of the article was when I read about another incident of strangers stealing the pictures of someone else's kids. A picture of two young children ages 3 and 6 were shared by a stranger to the page of some man in China. The mother of the two children was notified by Facebook that the photo had been shared. She traced the share link to a Chinese page with thousands of followers where she discovered the page contained pictures of many young girls. The mother knew the share linked back to her Facebook page which contained personal information such as her home address so she deleted the post that the share link used and immediately changed her privacy settings.
The main issue with both of these examples of strangers stealing pictures of young children is the lack of parental responsibility on online social media websites. The article quotes the Federal Trade Commission that the Children's Online Privacy Protection Art, "imposes certain requirements on operators of websites or online services directed to children under 13 years of age, and on operators of other websites or online services that have actual knowledge that they are collecting personal information online from a child under 13 years of age." Unfortunately, this Children's Online Privacy Protection Act cannot prevent parents from posting pictures of their children publicly and guarantee their privacy. If parents are going to post pictures of their children or personal information online, it is up to the parents to be diligent, responsible, and up to date on privacy settings to ensure their children's pictures are protected along with their own personal information.
Your post makes me think of two major problems. One related and one unrelated.
ReplyDeleteThe first problem: Default settings on most accounts provide no privacy to users and this should change! I really don’t understand why the default is so open. At least have the default where for example Facebook can use your content but only your friends can see your posts. Then everyone wins and the person can always “block” Facebook from using their content later.
The second problem: The military has major problems with spouses and family members posting about their loved ones in the military. This essentially reveals the movement of soldiers and is a major risk to their lives. For example, if someone posts something like “23 days until my love get back from Iraq” equates to his name being traced to his unit which allows enemy forces to target that unit when they know they will be at a specific place for that departure. This is very unsafe and the military is having a hard time cracking down on it.