Police in Germany have warned Facebook users not to post pictures of their children on the website. The warning was issued by a German police department on the Facebook account of the department.
The police department is worried that predators may be looking at the images of the children and that posting the pictures might make the children vulnerable.
Facebook is a common tool used by parents to post pictures of the milestones of their children, such as their birth, their first birthday and their first day of school. Parents also post such pictures on other websites, such as Twitter and Instagram.
Other parents will go as far as to post pictures of their children on a daily basis, basically allowing anyone to gain insight into their lives. Most parents believe that the practice is safe and that it’s all in good harmless fun.
However, the Hagen Police Department is taking the matter more seriously. The Facebook message that they posted said that while parents might think that the images are cute, the son or daughter might find them “endlessly embarrassing”, and they could reveal unnecessary information to wrongdoers.
These wrongdoers could be anyone from a simple schoolhouse bully to a serious child predator.
Posting embarrassing photographs could result in the child being bullied further down the road. The Hagen Police Department says that it is critical to protect the privacy of children so that indents of bullying, harassment and possibly even kidnapping can be avoided.
The department knows that anybody can access social media, and putting images of a child on public display is not necessarily a wise choice by parents.
At the very least, parents have been advised to set their privacy settings so that strangers cannot view photographs of their children.
Since the appeal was posted on the Facebook page of the police department, it has been shared more than 100,000 times and seen by more than 7 million people.
Stay Connected
