Posting children's pictures on the internet

met

I'm not sure if this is the place for this thread, but I've been thinking about this. I put pictures of kids that I photograph and my nieces and nephews up on my smugmug in public galleries. I don't make them private/pword protected (unless specifically asked - which no one has) so that I can share them on dgrin for C&C, because I have a lot of friends and family that regularly check my site for new pictures and trying to give them a password every time would be annoying, people want to link to their Facebook, etc. I'm not a pro, I just like to share my pics with friends and family. I don't have any nekkie pics of them up, but there are some of them playing in the water in their swimsuits. I'm just trying to figure out if I should be more cautious in this regard. Obviously I don't put their last names, etc up but there are all kinds of pervs out there.

What do you guys think? What is your policy in regard to posting pictures of children?

Elaine

I just wanted to point out that I believe you can still share pics here, even from a locked gallery...as long as you have "External links" set to "yes" in your gallery settings.

There are a lot of different thoughts on this, and to be honest, I'm not completely clear in my own mind where I stand. I was just reading an article about this, this morning. It's something important to consider, for sure.

PS - I know some people have kind of divided their Smug sites into private and non-private, by putting all private/family galleries behind a particular category, and to enter it you need a password. So, you could give family and friends one password so they could access your entire site. You'd have to decide which pics belonged where.

du8die

I have a non-listed, non-indexable gallery that I call Grin specifically for the purpose of putting pics up on dgrin. It's a little extra work, but I then put only the pics I want to share up here...

Qarik

I don't worry about that kind of thing personally.

Sam

Very sad times we live in when one actually thinks about things like this. :cry

Sam

marikris

My dad took pictures of my nieces and mixed it with a video for youtube, then he gave all the links to our families. My cousin, their mom, immediately told him to take it off. She only recently started posting in facebook with pictures.

I guess it's different for everybody. I have pics for my family in their own set of unlisted galleries. I just email them the link if they want to view them. Otherwise, I ask the moms if it's ok for me to post pics for critique on dgrin, or a least tell them that I'm doing so. No problems yet.

D'Buggs

marikris wrote:

I ask the moms if it's ok for me to post pics for critique on dgrin, or a least tell them that I'm doing so. No problems yet.

I too, but get very little tolerance from the parents..... Funny, cause I know they post my work on other sites (FB for example) but in general, don't care for other people showing off their "Precious".

T. Bombadil

met wrote:

. . . . I put pictures of kids that I photograph and my nieces and nephews up on my smugmug in public galleries.
What do you guys think? What is your policy in regard to posting pictures of children?

I am more paranoid than most - putting passwords on almost every photo of a child. I take a lot of photos of children playing on sports teams, and think it is my responsibility to be at least as protective of those other children as of my own.

While none of my photos would be of any interest to pervs, I do think there is a risk that a local creep could gather information that would help them gain the confidence of a child ("I saw you play in Saturday's game - wow that was great . . .") by having a little knowledge that would make them seem to be a trustworthy adult.

Over-cautious? Maybe. But passwords aren't THAT difficult to deal with. I love the freedom to publish that the Internet provides - but I still think it is good to know your audience (in every sense).

GP Images

Quote: ("I saw you play in Saturday's game - wow that was great . . .")

Why would the person not just cruise the local sports scene and spot his victim in person? He could probably get the name of the coach and the parents name within just a few minutes of standing on the sidelines. Without going into lengthy detail, there is no reason to be paranoid about most of the things we are paranoid about and this is one of them.

thoth

GP Images wrote:

... there is no reason to be paranoid about most of the things we are paranoid about...

Amen!

Now where'd I put that H1N1 vaccine...

Yuri Pautov

Sam wrote:

Very sad times we live in when one actually thinks about things like this. :cry

Sam

When I was arrested by police while I was taking photos I told my forum friends about this and someone said (Harry as I remember):
"I remember the times when I was taking pictures of planes sitting on a hill near airport and policemen passing by waved from the car:Hi, Harry!"
Really sad...
(sorry for my English)

T. Bombadil

Why would the person not just cruise the local sports scene and spot his victim in person? He could probably get the name of the coach and the parents name within just a few minutes of standing on the sidelines.

Spotting the victim and being able to gain the victim's trust are two different things.

Getting names of parents and the coach would require the hypothetical creep to speak to adults at the scene. Asking a 'fellow parent' the name of the coach would be very odd, and would raise suspicion. Not a likely approach, in my view. Far more likely is the guy using Google or local-access cable to view community events from home and learning something of his victims that could be used to gain their confidence.

Without going into lengthy detail, there is no reason to be paranoid about most of the things we are paranoid about and this is one of them.

I happen to think there is no reason to publish photos for the whole world to see when their intended audience can be identified. Password protection is pretty easy on Smugmug (could be better, as has been proposed on their feature request board).

I'm the one who used the word 'paranoid', but I didn't mean it literally. It isn't paranoid to mitigate risks. If the cost of mitigation is small, the risk need not be great.

What constitutes small cost or great risk is up to each of us to work out as these are relative terms. If you have done some analysis that suggests the risk of child-abduction is vanishingly small in your home town, that doesn't mean the same is true where I am.

In my view, the cost of keeping the photos locked is zero. Any individual images that I wish to share can be copied to an open gallery. Some (however little) risk mitigated at zero cost is a good cost/benefit trade.

Your mileage may vary.

mcschmidt_00

Not that I don't think it's a dangerous world, but I think the likelihood of someone picking my couple of videos or my photos from all the pictures and videos of children on the net, and then having the wherewithal to crack into Google's (youtube) or AT&T servers to trace back my IP address is pretty slim. I'm a hell of a lot more worried about someone following us home from the grocery store.

That said, the vanity domain name I use for my Smugmug account is registered privately so that my name and address don't show up in whois.

Agnieszka

It's true, we live in a very sad time (well, not really, but sometimes you wonder ... )

All my professional galleries are password protected. I only have a couple that aren't. Setting up a "universal" password for family members is very easy ...

Also, you should consider the fact that photos are stolen and used in inproper ways the whole time. Check out this article:
Toyota and Saatchi Used Images From Flickr Without Permission:

http://industry.bnet.com/advertising/10004563/toyota-and-saatchi-used-images-from-flickr-without-permission/

I guess the only way to protect yourself and anybody that you photographed, is to password protect your galleries (and I would also stay away from enabling the option of others seeing the original size photo) ... you never know where they end up ...

adbsgicom

Agnieszka wrote:

All my professional galleries are password protected. I only have a couple that aren't. Setting up a "universal" password for family members is very easy ...

I see how to set up a site-wide password, but I don't see anything that would be a single password for family. I also see that if my family were smugmug users, I could work it that way as well. How do you keep unique pw protection in place while providing general access to a few?

Agnieszka

adbsgicom wrote:

I see how to set up a site-wide password, but I don't see anything that would be a single password for family. I also see that if my family were smugmug users, I could work it that way as well. How do you keep unique pw protection in place while providing general access to a few?

Oh, in that case just make the password the same for all the galleries that will *only* be accessed by your family anyway ... I don't think there is any other way. Either universal access, or not ...

toddb

worth thinking about
My sister-in-law sent tap shoes to my 3-year old daughter because she loves to dance. She put them on and I shot a video of her in them and posted it on YouTube so the in-laws could see it...within 10 minutes there was a comment on the video asking how old she was from a user name I didn't recognize. I tracked the user name to find a lot of 'favorited' videos of young girls dancing on YouTube and then googled the user name and found a MySpace site for the guy -- felt like he was harmless, but also seemed to have some odd interests for a 30-something year old male. I pulled the video.

Thought about that a lot before ever posting anything on any other site. Most I make password protected, but lurked long enough on here that I felt a little more comfortable with the users of the site. That being said - creeps are everywhere and it never hurts to be cautious.