Who's clicking on your kids?

12-31-2009 National:

___ loves taking photos of her three young children and sharing them with family and close friends. But the South Charlotte mom won't post them on Facebook or other social networks. She's afraid.

“I'm kind of paranoid posting photos of them,” said 33-year-old ___, a former Bank of America employee turned stay-at-home mom. “I don't want to give up our privacy.”

___, a mom of two boys who owns a Charlotte cleaning service, also refuses to put her children's pictures out there for public perusal.

“My fears are based largely on watching too many news programs like ‘To Catch a Predator' or even fictional dramas like ‘Law and Order SVU,'” Wills confessed. “I know child predators lurk all over the Internet and I don't want to put my kids in harm's way.

“Keeping that info private is just one more level of protection, kind of like not putting their names on the backs of their T-shirts or book bags.”

While neither ___ nor ___ has experienced problems with online photos, they know others who have. ___ recalls a disgruntled neighbor who found a photo of the neighborhood president and her sons on a Web site and made a poster disparaging her. “It was creepy,” ___ said.

And there are other stories from around the country. ___, a mother of two and professional photographer, had an awful run-in with the dark side of the Internet. Someone had created a fake profile on a Brazil Web site using headshots of ___'s 4-year-old daughter. The site gave her a fake name and a relationship status that said she was interested in making friends and dating men. The site deleted the profile after ___ complained.

Such is the stuff of parents' nightmares in the social networking age, when Facebook is rapidly taking the place of the baby book. Young parents are flooding photo-sharing and social networking sites – Snapfish, Twitter, YouTube, even Match.com – with images of their children dancing, singing and bathing.

Not everyone is sure that all that sharing is such a good idea. Several groups on Facebook rail against people posting children's photos. On Parenting.com, the editor, Susan Kane, says the debate “is constantly going on.” And on blogs, school listservs and at kitchen tables, the argument flares: should young children's photos be shared online?

Just consider these recent postings on MomsCharlotte.com, the Observer's Web site for parents:

“I wouldn't post pictures of seminaked kids or anything that would reveal too much; i.e. a picture in which my home address or car license tag is on display.”

“I so rarely put photos online, it's not really been an issue. I don't see much harm in posting photos, really ... I realize cyber-pervs are out there lurking, but merely showing my or my kids' faces online shouldn't be cause for panic.”

“I post mine on Facebook but I'm starting to get weirded out by that. I've seen pics of friends' friends' friends and I don't like the idea of the kids faces being out there in cyberspace.”

Haphazard rules

Like other parental debates – whether to spank or when to let children travel alone – the issue tends to divide parents into two familiar camps: the vigilant and the laissez-faire. Some parents want to protect their children from what is unlikely but still tragically possible. Others say children will do best when learning to live with the realities of the Web.

Squashed in the middle are parents who impose their own haphazard rules: Only post on password-protected sites. Leave out names. Yes to Flickr, no to YouTube. And for heaven's sake, no bathtub photos.

___, a west Charlotte mom of a 1-year-old, says it's no big deal posting photos of her son online, as long as they aren't of him naked or show revealing details on where they live.

“I am just another random person among millions in my online life, same as I am in real life, and merely having my or my family's faces posted online should not be cause for alarm,” ___ said.

Other parents see a case of dangerously mixed messages: How can you teach a child not to share private information if you post a picture of him wearing his baseball uniform – with the town name – as your profile photo on Facebook?

Seeing ‘techno-panic'

Parental fears about sexual predators are misplaced, experts on online safety say.

“Research shows that there is virtually no risk of pedophiles coming to get kids because they found them online,” said Stephen Balkam, chief executive of the Family Online Safety Institute. While the debate makes this crime seem common, he said, all the talk is really just “techno-panic.”

Professor David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, says TV shows like the “Dateline NBC” program “To Catch a Predator” have falsely inflated the danger of the Internet.

“There is this characterization of pedophiles using the Internet as an L.L. Bean catalog, but this is not the way it happens,” he said. Predators are much more likely to look in chat rooms or other sites, he said, where teenagers are suggesting that they may be open to a sexual relationship.

The real danger is that a photo is appropriated and mistreated.

___, a blogger from Westminster, Colo., 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,” ___ said. ..Source.. Staff and News Reports