There are two different factions of parents on TikTok. There are two groups: those who crack eggs on their children’s heads for likes, and those who try desperately to keep their children from finding out who they are on the internet.
The 35-year-old TikTok star, who posts under the name Kodye Elyse, stopped posting about her three children on social media after a bad experience online. A video she posted of her young daughter dancing in 2020 garnered millions of views and creepy comments from strange men. (She requested that the New York Times not publish her full name because she and her children have had her personal information exposed in the past.)
“It’s like the ‘Truman Show’ of the internet,” said Kodie Ellis, who has 4 million followers on TikTok and posts about her work as a cosmetic tattoo artist and her experiences as a single mother. . She said, “You never know who you’re looking for.””
After that experience, she deleted images of her children from the internet. She tracked all of her accounts online, including Facebook and her Pinterest, and either deleted them or made them private.She has since joined the noisy camp of TikTokers encourage Other parents should also avoid posting publicly about their children.
But in September, she realized that her efforts were not completely successful. Kodye Elyse used her PimEyes, an amazing search engine that uses facial recognition technology to search for photos of people on the internet within seconds. When she uploaded a photo of her 7-year-old son, the results included an image of her son that she had never seen before. She needed a $29.99 subscription to see where the images came from.
Her ex-husband took their son to a soccer game and was seated in the front row behind the goal in the background of a photo on a sports news site. She realized she couldn’t get the press to remove her photos, but deletion requestI submitted it to PimEyes via an online form so that my son’s image would not appear if others searched for his face.
She also discovered that her now 9-year-old daughter’s childhood photo was being used to promote a summer camp she attended. She asked the camp to remove her photo, and it was removed.
“I think everyone should check it out,” Codier Ellis said. “It’s a good way to know that no one is reusing images of your child.”
Be careful about “sharing”
How much parents should post about their children online has been hotly debated and scrutinized, to the point where the jarring term “sharing” has been coined.
Historically, the main criticism of parents who overshare online has been the invasion of their offspring’s privacy, but advances in artificial intelligence-based technology present new ways for bad actors to exploit their children’s online content. has been done.
New risks include fraud using deepfake technology that imitates children’s voices, and the possibility that strangers could learn a child’s name and address simply by searching for a photo.
Amanda Lenhart, director of research at Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that provides media advice to parents, points out. Recent public service campaigns Deutsche Telekom called for children’s data to be shared more carefully. The video featured an actress who played a 9-year-old girl named Ella, whose fictional parents had the imprudence to post photos and videos of her online. Deepfake technology produced a digitally aged Ella, her voice was duplicated to make her fictional parents believe that her identity had been stolen and she had been abducted, and her voice was replicated to remind her of her childhood. She tells her that her nude photos have been misused.
Lenhart described the video as “high-pressure,” but said it emphasized that “the technology is actually really, really good.”people are already receive a call from a scammer Use a version of your voice created with an AI tool to imitate the voice of a loved one at risk.
Earlier this year, Arizona mother Jennifer DeStefano received a call from someone claiming to have kidnapped her 15-year-old daughter. “I answered the phone, ‘Hello,'” said Stefano. “On the other end, her daughter Brianna was sobbing and saying, ‘Mommy.'” Congressional testimony This summer.
She was negotiating to pay the kidnappers $50,000 when she discovered her daughter at home “resting safely in bed.”
What you can tell from your face
Facial recognition technology, which has become more powerful and accurate in recent years, can now associate obscure photos and videos online with someone’s face. Photos taken at schools, daycare centers, birthday parties, playgrounds, etc. are likely to show up in these searches. (The school or daycare center should offer you an exemption, but feel free to say no.)
“The younger the child, the more control parents have over their image,” said Debbie Reynolds, a data privacy and emerging technology consultant. “But kids grow up. They have friends. They go to parties. School takes pictures.”
Reynolds recommends parents use services like PimEyes or FaceCheck.ID to search for their child’s face online. If she doesn’t like what’s posted, she says she should ask the website where the photo was posted to take it down. (Some companies do, but others, such as news organizations, may not.)
in 2020 pew research survey, more than 80% of parents report sharing photos, videos, and information about their children on social media sites. Experts cannot say how many parents share these images only on private social media accounts rather than publicly, but private sharing is increasingly common. He said that it has become.
When she shares digital photos of her daughter, she often uses private messaging apps or an Instagram account that is limited to friends and family. But when I searched for their faces on PimEyes, I also discovered a public photo I had forgotten of when my now 6-year-old daughter was 2 years old. It was attached to a story I wrote. I requested that PimEyes remove the image. It will be removed from results and no longer appear in searches.
Public face search engines are a potentially useful tool for parents, but they can also be misused.
Privacy researcher Bill Fitzgerald said: “Tools like PimEyes can and are just as easily used by stalkers as they are by concerned parents.” and also expressed concern about overbearing parents using the tool to monitor the behavior of their teenagers.
PimEyes owner Giorgi Gobronydze said more than 200 accounts had been disabled on the site due to inappropriate searches of children’s faces.
A similar facial recognition engine, Clearview AI, has limited its use to law enforcement. is used Identifying victims from child sexual abuse photos. Gobronidze said Pim Eyes has been similarly used by human rights organizations to help children. But he says PimEyes is concerned enough about potential child offenders using the service that it is working on a feature that will block searches for faces that appear to belong to minors. (Privacy researcher Fitzgerald worries that parents using the tool to find their children may be unintentionally helping the PimEyes algorithm to better recognize minors.) are doing.)
Mimi Ito, a cultural anthropologist and director of the Connected Learning Lab at the University of California, Irvine, said facial recognition technology is making it more difficult to share photos of happy children online. .
“With AI, there’s a growing recognition that we don’t really have control over all the data that’s being spewed out into the social media ecosystem,” she said.
The right to control your online footprint
Lucy and Mike Fitzgerald, professional ballroom dancers from St. Louis, maintain an active social media presence to promote their business, posting images of their daughters, ages 5 and 3. refrain from posting online and ask friends and family to abide by the prohibition. . They believe that daughters should also have the right to create and control their own online footprint. They also worry that their images will be used inappropriately.
“The fact that you can steal someone’s photo and use it for anything with just a few clicks is alarming,” Fitzgerald said. “We understand the appeal of posting pictures of your child, but ultimately you don’t want your child to face unintended consequences.”
Fitzgerald and her husband are not experts in “knowing what’s looming on the technology horizon,” she said. But she added that they “felt” years ago that “features that we can’t foresee now were coming and were going to end up being a problem for kids.”
From National Security Agency contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden to Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, parents know the details of what’s looming on the tech horizon. Most likely, the child’s face is hidden in public social media posts. In a holiday-themed Instagram post, Mr. Zuckerberg used the clumsy emoji technique of placing digital stickers on the heads of his older children, while Mr. Snowden and his wife, Lindsay Mills, One of the sons was cleverly posed behind a balloon to keep it out of sight. his face.
“I want kids to have the option to put themselves out there in the world whenever they’re ready, in whatever capacity they want,” Mills said.
A spokesperson for Mr. Zuckerberg declined to comment or explain why the baby’s face was not given similar treatment or whether it was because facial recognition technology does not work well on young children.
“Online Ghost” for future success
Many experts say that teens are thinking a lot about how they manage their digital identities, and that they are careful to keep their accounts online so that parents, teachers, and potential employers can’t find them. He pointed out that some people were using fake names. However, if that account has a public image of your face, it can be linked to using a face search engine.
“Your face is so hard to keep off the internet.,” Said priya kumaran assistant professor at Pennsylvania State University who studies the privacy implications of sharing.
Dr. Kumar suggests parents involve children as young as 4 in the posting process and discuss which images are okay to share.
Amy Webb, CEO of the Future Today Institute, a technology-focused business consultancy, vowed: slate post Ten years ago, it was mandated that children’s private photos and personal information not be posted online. (Some readers took this as a challenge, I found a family photo Webb inadvertently exposed how difficult it is to keep children off the internet. Her daughter, now a teenager, said she appreciated being an “online ghost” and that she thought it would help her in her work.
Prospective employers “will literally never find anything because I don’t have a platform,” she said. “It will help me succeed in the future.”
Other young people who grew up in the era of online sharing also said they were grateful to their parents for not publicly posting their photos online. Shreya Nallamothu, 16, is a high school student whose research on child influencers contributed to the development of New Illinois. State Law This requires parents to set aside income for their children when they appear in monetized online content. She said she was “so grateful” her parents didn’t post “my very embarrassing moment” on social media.
“Some people in my grade are great at finding the Facebook pages of their classmates’ parents and scrolling down,” she says. They use all kinds of disgusting ingredients for birthday posts that disappear on Snapchat.
Ariel Geismar, 22, a college student and digital safety advocate in Washington, D.C., described it as “the privilege of growing up without having a digital identity.”
“Right now, kids are the guinea pigs for technology,” Geismar said. “It’s our responsibility to take care of them.”