The real danger is that a photo is appropriated and mistreated.
Gretchen White, a blogger from Westminster, Colorado, discovered a young woman on MySpace passing off pictures of her baby as her own. “It turns out she had faked a pregnancy online and needed a baby to show for it,” White said.
Suspicious friends of the young woman traced the photo back to White’s blog and alerted her. “My initial reaction was, I’m never blogging again,” White said, but decided instead to brand all her pictures with a watermark of her blog’s URL, an increasingly common tactic for mommy bloggers.
Rachel Sarah, author of the book Single Mom Seeking, recently came across a Web site for a group in California that used a picture of her and her daughter as an advertisement. They took it down at her request, but she said the experience was “unsettling.”
The possibility always exists that pedophiles are lifting such pictures, Finkelhor says, but it is not something he has encountered. And, he said, it’s unlikely for a discomfiting reason: Actual child pornography is so readily available that pedophiles aren’t likely to waste time cruising social networks looking for less explicit material.
Regardless of what danger may come to your children by posting pictures, there is one hazard whose existence no one can question: other parents. And their wrath could be enough to make anyone think twice before posting photos of little Charlie’s fourth birthday party.
Aaron Baar, a freelance writer from Chicago, posted a video last year of his son’s school holiday concert on YouTube, so his parents could see it.
“I put it up there and I forgot about it,” he said. But he had tagged the video with the name of the school, and one by one students started finding it.
Several months later he received an e-mail message from the mother of the child standing next to his son asking him to take it down. That parent also shared her e-mail message with the class’ other parents, touching off a small avalanche of disapproving posts on a local message board regarding Baar’s parenting skills.
“To this day I don’t feel comfortable bringing a camera to a school play,” he said.
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