Paranoid Parent Syndrome - to post pictures off offspring?

philthejuggler wrote in post #5473621
I have decided on a compromise solution. I take lots of photos of children of friends / family so if I post a random assortment then no-one will know which is mine and which isn't!

I'm actually very uncomfortable about posting pics of friends/family's children. My thinking is they may not want their child's image posted on the internet, and if they happened to find it, they'd be very upset.

Mark1 wrote in post #5539077
A bit off the wall here, but a parallel example I have used before..... To me it is the same as obscuring your liscence plate when posting a pic of your car. How many thousands of people see your car every day, AND KNOW WHERE IT IS. But will obscure the plate when showing 4 people on the other side of the world. Same with the kids. How many chanced do you really take each day? THRUTHFULLY? Now how minute of a chance is it to just show a picture of your kids on a forum?

Good point regarding license plates, however someone could use the plate number to gather any public information about the vehicle.

Having said that, I have had a couple interesting experiences regarding posting pictures of my son and wife. One lead to a name change:

All pictures on my flickr account used to be public, including pictures of my son. now, I have pictures of him, my wife, myself, friends and family all set to private. It's really unfortunate, because I have a wonderful picture I took of my wife reading to my son. It got tons of views and lots of attention, and was my most popular photo.

The incident that did it: My wife's ex found a picture I took of the three of us together. She got wind of it and freaked out. I then proceeded to mask my identity a bit and made private all public pictures.

The other one was actually somewhat positive (though, it didn't start that way). I posted pictures of my son's baptism on another forum, my wife was attending a program at the library focused on reading to your baby. Someone at the library recognized her from the pictures on the forum. After a while, she approached my wife and introduced herself. My wife was not happy to begin with, but now we've become good friends with this family and my wife participates on the forum.

I do still post pictures of my son here, and the other forum. I figure its less likely anyone I don't desire to have contact with will be prowling these boards.

The pictures in question:

Reading:

superdiver wrote in post #5531291
I dont post pictures of my kids cuz they are ugly...lol just kidding...

I think that not posting pictures of your kids because you are worried of harm is unreasonably paranoid.

Think about it. Crazies dont stalk thier victims based on internet photos (sure they my get off in thier sick way with them) but when it comes to actual harm they will base that on where they see your kid walking around, their habits, when they are vulnerable. If you were handing out these kinds of hints and stats with the pictures, then sure you should be worried, but other then that, no...

Unless you are rich or famous and a target the only other reason to target your kids is because they are easy targets by being alone where they shouldnt, or by not understanding the not talking to strangers rules and such...

Which brings up this, the VAST majority (over 95% if memory serves) of crimes committed against children occur from direct family members and close friends...

think about that... from that I would not allow my kids around my friends and family! They are way more likely to commit a crime against them!

agree 100%. the other thing which is doesn't make sense to me is when people blur out their license plate of their car. [edit - mark1 beat me to this same observation]

steveathome wrote in post #5472997
(personally I really don't understand why anyone would like to advertise what gear they have - thats just me)

i do it so that if people have a technical question about a specific shot, they can likely deduce what gear i was using and know that i could hopefully reasonably answer the query.

Just looking at some of the child posts in the 'People' section of the forum and going back a bit some of them have been viewed maybe 4,5 or 600 times. Viewed by people who know nothing about the child shown, other than maybe a general location. My point is bringing your child to school, shopping, playground etc they will be seen by many more people than will ever view them here - and they know exactly where they are.

DocFrankenstein wrote in post #5560579
So, it's ok if someone molests the neighbour's kids... or the kids of the clients... as long as the chances of your kids getting it are lower. lol

someone please demonstrate evidence that posting pictures of anonymous kids on the internet leads to sexual abuse by strangers.

philthejuggler wrote in post #5573263
No - what I mean't was that if there were 500 pictures of kids posted by me, with mine amongst them no one would bother tracking me down specifically because they wouldn't know which if any were mine so the whole tracking exercise would be pointless!!!

There is no way I'd knowlingly endanger any kids!

They'd be tracking YOU down, to learn how to get access to so many kids fast.

On my big list of things to worry about, this is pretty low on the list. It's well below car crashes, tornadoes, getting stung by a bee, and even the zombie apocalypse.

I highly doubt any predators would try to track down some kids the saw a few pictures of on the internet. I'm pretty sure most internet predators stick to chats/myspace/facebook​/etc... since this is where they can contact them, arrange meetings, etc... And even then the risk is small unless you let your kids on the internet totally unsupervised and don't talk to them about the dangers of the internet.

If you choose to not post pictures on the net because your afraid someone might track them down, you might as well not let your kids out in public. This is where they are much much more likely to encounter a predator that could attempt to kidnap them or whatever. How many times do you hear about a kid that was kidnapped in a mall where the parent "just turn around for two seconds"?

The amount of pictures of kids on the net is staggering, go to Google image search, type in kids. I get 38 million hits, and I'm sure there are way more pictures of kids than that on the internet. Your kid would have to a pretty special snowflake for someone to pick them out of every other kid on the net, track them down, and kidnap them.

I hardly think it would/might be a problem (I dont have kids. . errr ) - if you keep your little details to yourself.

Mark1 wrote in post #5539077
A bit off the wall here, but a parallel example I have used before..... To me it is the same as obscuring your liscence plate when posting a pic of your car. How many thousands of people see your car every day, AND KNOW WHERE IT IS. But will obscure the plate when showing 4 people on the other side of the world. Same with the kids. How many chanced do you really take each day? THRUTHFULLY? Now how minute of a chance is it to just show a picture of your kids on a forum?

I think something happening as a result of a license plate would be more likely... albeit still rare... than something happening from a posted photo of a kid. Using the license plate as step one to stealing someone's identity, I mean.

The crime against the kid would be personal in nature and based on some kind of physical attraction, and geographical location is a factor. Whereas the identity theft would be more random, can be done from anywhere in the world without travelling, and probably based on nothing more than "Hey, that guy has a nice car, I bet he has some good credit lines I could exploit.".