Once It’s Out There, It’s Out There: The Real Dangers of Sharing Your Child’s Face Online
By Andrea Simpson, Founder of My Peeps
There’s a moment every new parent knows. Your baby grins for the first time, or takes that wobbly first step, or falls asleep in a ridiculous position with food on their face and your first instinct is to share it. With your mom. With your best friend. With the world.
That instinct comes from a beautiful place: pure, overflowing love.
But here’s what nobody tells you in the exhausted, joyful blur of new parenthood: every photo you post publicly of your child is a permanent, unretractable piece of data that will exist on the internet long after you’ve forgotten you posted it. And in 2025, the risks attached to that reality have never been more serious.
This isn’t about being fearful. It’s about being informed. Because the decision you make today about what to share is one your child will inherit and they have no say in it yet.
What Is “Sharenting,” and Why Does It Matter?
The term “sharenting”, a blend of sharing and parenting, describes the practice of parents publicly posting photos, videos, and personal details about their children on social media. A 2010 study found that 92% of two-year-olds in the United States already had an online presence. That number has only grown.
A 2024 systematic review published in the Journal of Family Theory & Review, analyzing 61 empirical studies on sharenting, found that the vast majority of parents share intimate details about their children’s lives including photos, videos, personal milestones often without realizing the cumulative risks. The review found that most research contends sharenting has the potential to negatively impact children’s privacy because parents may unintentionally reveal sensitive details like their child’s location or daily routines.
The 2024 Digital Education Working Group of the Global Privacy Assembly, an international body of data protection authorities, formally flagged sharenting as an important emerging topic that is actively harmful to children’s rights and personal data.
This isn’t fringe concern. This is becoming global policy.
The Dangers Are Real — and Growing
1. Your child’s digital footprint starts before they can speak
When you post a photo of your newborn with their full name, hospital, and birthday, you have already begun building a digital dossier on a person who cannot consent to it. By the time your child is old enough to understand what a digital footprint is, theirs may span years of content they never chose to create.
France recognized this so seriously that in 2024, it passed new legislation specifically protecting children’s image rights from sharenting and legally requiring parents to jointly protect their child’s image and expanding their obligations to guard their child’s privacy online. France is among the first, but it won’t be the last.
2. Identity theft targets children precisely because no one’s watching
Barclays Bank has projected that sharenting will account for two-thirds of identity fraud cases by 2030. Why children? Because a child’s Social Security number and identity can sit dormant and unmonitored for 18 years. Thieves can open credit accounts, take out loans, and build a fraudulent financial history and the family won’t discover it until the child tries to get their first credit card or apartment.
Every piece of identifying information shared online, a child’s full name, birthdate, school name, hometown, or even their face can be pieced together by bad actors. And once information is online, it is essentially permanent.
3. AI deepfakes have made children’s photos a direct threat vector
This is the danger that has escalated most dramatically and most parents are unaware of it.
A 2025 report from the Childlight Global Child Safety Institute found that technology-facilitated child abuse cases in the United States grew from 4,700 in 2023 to over 67,000 in 2024. A significant portion involved AI-generated deepfakes: tools that can take a real photo of a child and, in as little as 15 minutes and using as few as 20 existing images, generate sexually explicit fabricated content. A joint study by UNICEF, Interpol, and ECPAT International estimated that at least 1.2 million children had their images manipulated into sexualized deepfakes in a single year.
The Internet Watch Foundation reported a 26,385% increase in AI-generated child abuse videos between 2024 and 2025. That is not a typo.
In January 2025, a North Carolina child psychiatrist was convicted of federal charges after using an AI app to digitally alter photos of children posing on their first day of school -> -> photos that had been publicly posted on Facebook!
The FBI reported a 60% increase in sextortion complaints in the first seven months of 2025 compared to the previous year. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s CyberTipline received over one million reports related to generative AI between January and September 2025 alone.
The source material for these crimes? Publicly posted photos. Photos that look just like the ones on your Instagram feed right now.
4. Predators use public photos to build profiles and gain trust
Online predators don’t just look for opportunity, they build it. Public photos and posts can be used to learn a child’s name, school, neighborhood, interests, and daily schedule. This information becomes the foundation for grooming: a slow, calculated process of building trust with a child (or their caregivers) before exploitation.
Online enticement reports to NCMEC’s CyberTipline jumped from 292,951 in the first half of 2024 to 518,720 in the first half of 2025. This is a nearly 77% increase in just one year.
5. Your child may resent it — and they’d have a point
This one doesn’t make headlines, but it matters. A growing number of children who grew up as subjects of heavy sharenting have spoken publicly about feeling their privacy was violated, their childhood was documented without consent, and embarrassing moments were available to anyone who searched for them.
Children’s rights advocates and child psychologists increasingly argue that children have a right to develop their own digital identity and that parents making permanent public decisions on their behalf, before they have any say, is an ethical question worth sitting with.
I speak from experience here as this happened with my own children!
“But I Only Share With Friends and Family”
This is the most common reassurance and it’s worth examining honestly.
Even when profiles are set to “friends only”:
- Social platforms have had significant, repeated data breaches
- Friends and family may share or screenshot without thinking
- Photos can be scraped by third-party apps connected to your account
- Platform policies can change, retroactively affecting your privacy settings
- You cannot control who your connections share with
The only truly private sharing is sharing built for privacy by design, not retrofitted privacy settings on a platform that was built for public visibility.
What You Can Do Instead
1. Adopt a “less is more” standard. Harvard Law faculty member Leah Plunkett, author of Sharenthood, recommends a simple mental benchmark: share no more about your child online than you would put in a holiday card. A holiday card doesn’t include your child’s full name, school, address, or daily schedule.
2. Never include identifying details. Even seemingly harmless details like a school uniform, a street name in the background, a sports team jersey can combine with other information to pinpoint your child’s location and routine.
3. Audit what’s already out there. Do a periodic reverse image search on photos you’ve posted. Check who can actually see your posts, and whether old posts are still visible.
4. Have the conversation with family. Grandparents and extended family are often the biggest unintentional sharers. Share what you’ve learned and set clear expectations.
5. Choose platforms and tools that are built for privacy, not around it. I built My Peeps exactly for this reason…
A Better Way to Preserve the Memories
Here’s the truth: you should absolutely document your child’s life. These moments are irreplaceable. The goal isn’t to stop capturing memories, it’s to protect them.
My Peeps was built specifically for this. It’s a private memory-keeping app where you can document your child’s milestones, upload photos and videos, record voice notes, and share everything with exactly the people who matter – for example grandparents in another state, your closest friends, your chosen family. This is without any of it ever appearing on a public feed.
There are no ads or metrics. There is no algorithm deciding who sees your child’s face. Just your memories, preserved beautifully, shared privately.
For families looking for additional private options, a few others worth exploring:
- FamilyAlbum — a free photo-sharing app specifically for family groups, with private albums
- Tinybeans — a private journal and photo-sharing platform designed for parents
- Google Photos shared albums — a step up from social media; private links shared with specific people only
Of course, we believe that My Peeps is superior to the choices above, but whatever you choose, choose to protect your child.
None of these are perfect, and none replace the intentionality of being thoughtful about what you share at all. But all of them are meaningfully safer than a public social media post.
The Permission Question
There’s a question that’s worth sitting with before every post:
If my child could see this at 16, would they be glad I shared it?
Children can’t give consent today. But they will have opinions about it someday. The digital footprint you’re building for them is one of the earliest decisions you’ll make on their behalf and unlike most parenting choices, this one has no undo button.
Memory-keeping isn’t about the audience. It’s about the relationship. Keep it close.
My Peeps is a private memory-keeping app for families and the people who love them. No public profiles. No likes. No strangers. Just the moments that matter, shared with the people who mean it. Learn more at mypeepsapp.com
Sources & Further Reading
- Tosuntaş, Ş. B. (2024). Sharenting: A systematic review of the empirical literature. Journal of Family Theory & Review, 16(3), 525–562.
- Global Privacy Assembly Digital Education Working Group (2024). Digital Parenting Survey.
- Data Protection Commission of Ireland (2024). Children’s Data Protection Campaign.
- Childlight Global Child Safety Institute (2025). Annual Report on Technology-Facilitated Child Abuse.
- UNICEF, Interpol & ECPAT International (2025). Joint Study on AI-Facilitated Child Exploitation.
- Internet Watch Foundation (2026). Harm Without Limits: AI CSAM Report.
- National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (2025). CyberTipline Mid-Year Statistics.
- Plunkett, L. A. (2019). Sharenthood: Why We Should Think Before We Talk About Our Kids Online. MIT Press.
- Harvard Law School / OPB Interview with Leah Plunkett (May 2024).
- NBC News (2026). “The AI Child Exploitation Crisis Is Here.”
- PBS NewsHour (2025). “Law Enforcement Cracking Down on AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Images.”
- Barclays Bank Report: Sharenting and Identity Fraud Projections.
