Photos of your children, and who else can see them

This is not an article telling you to stop posting pictures of your children. Most families do, most of the time it is harmless, and the joyless version of this advice helps nobody.

What is worth doing is making a few decisions once, rather than none at all.

What a photo gives away

Location, sometimes precisely. Most platforms strip GPS data on upload, but not all do, and a photo sent directly — email, a message, a shared drive — usually keeps it. More reliably, the picture itself gives it away: a school uniform, a street sign, a front door, a team shirt.

A routine. One photo shows a moment. Four years of photos show which school, which club on which evening, which park at weekends. The pattern is the part worth thinking about, not the individual post.

A face, over time. Enough images of the same child build something durable, and neither you nor they control where it ends up.

Material for a scam. Names, birthdays, pet names, first schools — the answers to security questions, and the details that make an impersonation convincing.

Where the real risk is, honestly

Not a stranger finding your house from a birthday photo, which is rare. More ordinary:

• Your own account being taken over, and years of family photos going with it. This is the common

one and it argues for two-factor more than for posting less.

• Photos being scraped by services you never heard of, which is routine and effectively

irreversible.

• The child's own view later. Teenagers are frequently unhappy about what was posted about them

at seven, and they were never asked.

The decisions worth making once

Who can see it. Private accounts, and a friends list you would actually recognise in the street. Most people's follower lists have drifted well past that.

Turn off location on the camera, or at least for shared photos. iPhone: Settings, Privacy and Security, Location Services, Camera, Never. Android: the camera app's own settings, "save location".

Decide about faces and names together with anyone else who posts — the other parent, grandparents, the school WhatsApp group. Your decision is only as good as the loosest person in the circle.

Avoid the obvious tells: school uniforms with a crest, the house number, the car registration, the first day of school post that names school, teacher and year group in one image.

Use a shared album rather than a public post for the ones that are really for family. Every platform has one, and nobody uses them.

Asking them

From about seven, children have opinions about this and are usually right about which pictures they mind. Asking costs nothing, and it teaches something about consent that is worth more than the setting.

The one many families settle on: nothing in a bath or a state of undress, nothing that would embarrass them at fourteen, and anything they ask to be taken down comes down without an argument.