Hilal Ahmad Bhat
Today it has become a common practice of people to make videos of children to earn likes and comments. They think it pleases people and people like to follow them. Making videos of children and posting them on social media poses severe privacy and security risks. Experts and safety organizations, strongly advice against sharing identifiable content, as bad actors and AI can scrape images to create illegal material or build digital dossiers on minors.
Main Reasons To Avoid Video Sharing |AI, Exploitation Risks: Publicly shared images and videos can be scraped by AI algorithms to create manipulated, hyper-realistic abusive content. Predators also use these videos to track children, build digital dossiers, or exploit them.
Loss of Consent, Autonomy: Children cannot consent to having their private moments broadcast to the public. Posting creates a permanent digital footprint without their participation, which can affect future academic or professional opportunities.
Security, Identity Theft: Videos often reveal personal identifying details—such as school names, locations, routines, or even home interiors. This information can be used by bad actors for identity theft or physical stalking.
Bullying, Harassment: Content that seems harmless or cute today can be weaponized by strangers for cyber bullying and blackmail.
“To protect children from online predators and AI data scraping, authorities strongly advise keeping their photos and videos off public social media feeds entirely. Understanding these privacy and safety risks is essential for practicing secure online sharing.”
What I Sharenting? “Sharenting” refers to the act of digital oversharing, of excessively posting information, pictures, stories or updates about your child’s life. In most cases, parents engage in sharenting with the purest of motives. But it can have unintended consequences for their kid’s privacy, safety, mental health social relationships and future prospects. It can also damage your relationship with them. “Sharenting” comes with lots of gray areas regarding a child’s privacy, autonomy, protection and right to informed consent,” Dr. Albers clarifies. “Some countries have put regulations in place to ensure parents are sharing safely. But we don’t have many laws in practice that protect children online. Everyone has to figure out for themselves when their social media use crosses a line.”
The Dangers Of Sharenting: Sharenting doesn’t only put a child’s mental health at risk — it can also endanger the child physically. We don’t always realize how much identifying information our posts and photos contain. “Sharenting’ opens a window directly into a child’s life, which predators or those with ill intent can abuse, it is Putting child‘s life online and can enable strangers to identity for theft, harassment, bullying, exploitation and even violence. The safest approach is to refrain from posting children online at all to prevent your content from being used by predators or scraped to train AI. Authorities advise of keeping children’s images off public feeds entirely. We must learn the risks and best practices for sharing photos and videos of children on social media, including privacy, safety.
(The author is a teacher at Govt High School Brakpora Anantnag. The views, opinions and conclusions expressed in this article are those of the author and aren’t necessarily in accord with the views of “Kashmir Horizon”)
