It's that time of year when parents are busy getting their children ready to head back to school. It's likely that your social media feeds will be filled with those classic back to school pictures.
Maybe you even post them.
But Chris McKenna, the founder of Protect Young Eyes, has a warning for you: "Have you ever thought about what you're sharing?"
If you post a picture of your child standing in front of the school bus with the name of the school visible, you are essentially telling them where to find your child, McKenna says.
"When it comes to parents and the amount of information we share about our families, there's always this tension that exists that social media wants you to brag and through that bragging you receive likes and comments and more friends," McKenna notes.
You may be sharing more personal information than you realize: the parks you visit, your child's birthday, their favorite toys or foods.
He also cautions against hashtags. Hashtags make it easier for predators to find what they want. "If I have bad intent, looking for photos of young kids taking a bath, it's extremely difficult to find what I'm looking for, except if they're hash-tagged."
By the time a child is 2 years old, 90% of them already have a social media presence, McKenna says. "We have a whole generation of young people who are going to become adults someday, who are going to have a social media footprint that they had no say in what their parents posted about them."
McKenna says one key to preventing oversharing outside your friends list is to check your privacy settings on all social media platforms.
But he challenges parents to just not share as much as they currently do. In fact, Mckenna has five questions you can ask yourself about web privacy. Click here, to learn more.
