The new reality of sharing kids' photos online
Sharing family photos is normal and well-intentioned. But the risk environment has changed. Images of children can now be copied, scraped, sexualized with AI, and reused in ways families never imagined. Here's what the research actually shows.
The baseline
Sharing children online is now the norm
In the UK, sharing photos, birthdays, health updates, and school milestones has become routine — most often on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.1
of parents share images or information about their children online.1
reported a negative incident affecting their child — privacy breaches, identity crime, or contact from strangers.1
images of the average child are estimated to be online before they turn five.6
It isn't only influencer families: in a long-running U.S. health poll, three-quarters of parents said another parent had shared too much about a child online.7
What changed
Ordinary photos are now raw material for AI abuse
Offenders increasingly take a child's face from public social media or school postings and use generative AI to fabricate explicit images. The reporting numbers have exploded.
Not just criminals
It's already a peer-to-peer problem
This isn't only organized crime. Sexualized deepfakes are spreading among teenagers, and the harm falls disproportionately on girls.
The harm map
Six ways ordinary photos get misused
Privacy & lost autonomy
A child's digital identity is set by adults long before they can consent to it.
Sexual exploitation
Innocent images are harvested and sexualized, including AI-fabricated abuse material.
Identity theft & fraud
Names, birthdays, and schools posted alongside photos fuel impersonation and fraud.
Doxxing & stalking
Uniforms, geotags, and routines lower the cost of locating a child in the real world.
Deepfakes
A single normal photo can be turned into sexualized or humiliating fabricated media.
Commercial misuse
In kidfluencer economies, children are monetized and optimized for reach and attention.
What you can do
Before you post, ask five things
The strongest advice from child-safety experts isn't a single setting — it's a habit: share less, share later, share smaller, and share privately.
- 01 Can this image identify my child?
- 02 Can it be used to locate my child?
- 03 Could it embarrass them later in life?
- 04 Could it be sexualized or turned into a deepfake?
- 05 Would I still post it if strangers copied it forever?
The safest default
Public feed vs. private, encrypted sharing
Public social feed
- Anyone can copy, screenshot, and re-share
- Discoverable and scrapeable by strangers and bots
- A server breach can expose viewable photos directly
- Captions leak names, schools, and locations
Maple Album
- End-to-end encrypted — only your family holds the keys
- No public feed, no algorithm, no strangers
- A server breach only exposes unreadable encrypted data
- Screenshot & screen-recording protection
Keep the moments. Skip the exposure.
Maple Album is a private, end-to-end encrypted home for your family's photos and videos — so you never have to trade your children's privacy for a place to share.
- 1. University of Southampton, “Harmful Sharenting in the UK” policy brief. southampton.ac.uk
- 2. National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, CyberTipline data (2024–2025). missingkids.org
- 3. Internet Watch Foundation, 2025 data on AI-generated child sexual abuse imagery. iwf.org.uk
- 4. Thorn, research on youth experiences with AI-generated sexual imagery. thorn.org
- 5. Children's Commissioner for England, research on children and explicit deepfakes. childrenscommissioner.gov.uk
- 6. UK estimates of children's online image footprint before age five (widely cited).
- 7. C.S. Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health, University of Michigan. mottpoll.org
- 8. Girlguiding, research on girls' exposure to pornographic deepfakes. girlguiding.org.uk