Why I Don’t Post Pictures of my Kids Online

Its back to school season and time for all of the first day of schools photos. I love seeing them, they’re always adorable. I posted a bluefish photo of our three-year-old a day after the photo was taken, and said I was posting even though I don’t like to post pictures of my kids on social media, and within a couple minutes a friend asked WHY. This is a normal question, its normal to want to show everyone how beautiful and smart your babies are, so its probably strange that I don’t but here is why.

1. Social Media companies… all of the major ones, have been guilty of selling user data. They have free license to use your photos which is a tidbit they hide in pages and pages of fine print, and I don’t want a company that has trust issues having free reign over photos of my kids.
2. I have hundreds and hundreds of Facebook “friends”. I would love to think that there is no one in that mess that would hurt a child, but I don’t KNOW that there isn’t, so I don’t post my children.
3. My children are too young to consent to me posting a photo of them online. It wasn’t an issue when I was a kid, but it is today. Photos, even deleted ones, can live on in the ether forever. It takes one person saving it…. a half second of effort to have it live on long after I close my account… long after the photo has been deleted. Once they’re at an age where they can say, “oh hey, I like that photo, post away”, we can have another discussion about it.

I don’t judge anyone who posts photos of their kids, I just don’t choose to do it.