All the Ways to Remove Your Child’s Image From the Internet
Perhaps you didn’t make every effort to hide your child’s existence from the Internet, and now you regret years of ” sharing ” on the Internet. Can you turn off the call? There are no guarantees, but we’ve put together some starting strategies for tracking and removing images of your child from the Internet.
Reasons to keep your faces offline
Whether your teen is embarrassed by old baby photos on Facebook or you’re concerned that nefarious people are using AI to turn your child’s image into something scary, there are plenty of reasons to do your best to remove their photos from the internet.
Dr. Tali Shenfield , a school and clinical psychologist, has written about the main reasons why parents should not post photos of their children online:
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Young children may not agree.
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Teens prefer to control their digital presence to maintain privacy and autonomy.
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The photos can provide fuel for bullies to use in the future.
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Metadata attached to photos reveals personal information beyond the image itself.
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Images and metadata can be used for identity theft and digital abduction (where someone uses photos of your child to claim they are their child).
Where to start searching and deleting photos
When it comes to managing your child’s online image, there are three “spheres of control”: yourself, people you know or sort of know, and people you don’t know.
Start your image cleanup project in the area of control where you have the most power (and where you’ll likely find the most photos): your own social networks, blogs, forums, and websites. We all worry about what could happen to children’s photos if they are released into the wild and caught by the wrong person. You can significantly reduce the likelihood of this happening by removing traces of photos that likely started leaking on social media (even in private or friends-only groups) immediately after the baby was born.
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Clean up your Facebook photo albums, delete posts on Instagram, Twitter and TikTok. If any of your accounts contain a lot of your child’s information, delete it entirely. Put your memories on your hard drive or album.
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Think about all the “What to Expect” forums and anxious parent message boards you’ve posted on in the past. Delete your accounts, especially if you’ve ever posted perhaps the cutest, most innocent, and now deeply embarrassing photo of your baby.
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Did you ever think for a minute that you would make your mark as a mommy blogger? Even if you’ve created a small blog just for family members to keep up with news about your baby, it’s time to put that stuff away.
However, many images of our children online are taken from sources outside of our own accounts. You will then begin to work on connecting with people you know (friends and family) as well as people you know (school, church, clubs, social groups) who may have innocently taken photos of your child and posted them on the Internet into the past.
If you are aware of specific photos, send a link in DM to the person or group on Facebook, Instagram, etc., politely but firmly asking them to remove the identifying photo. Ask close friends and family (those who are most likely to be cooperative and most likely to have photos) to go through their albums and delete any photos of your child.
If you know there are already photos of your child on social media but have not received a response asking the account owner to remove them, each platform has a process for requesting the removal of the image.
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On Facebook , fill out the form to report a photo that violates your child’s privacy. If your child is 13–17 years old, they will have to file the report themselves.
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On Instagram, you can also fill out a form to report your child’s picture. Instagram determines whether to act on your request based on privacy laws and whether the photo violates its community guidelines.
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On TikTok, use this form to report a privacy violation.
Finally, how do you identify and remove images of your child that exist somewhere on the Internet? Unfortunately, you don’t know what you don’t know. Start by finding out what any random person can find on Google.
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Search your child’s name and your name on Google to see if any images pop up that you weren’t aware of.
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Try search variations including names, city, school, club, church or social group. This may result in images appearing on individual websites.
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Use Google to perform a reverse image search on any images you have previously identified on your social media, other people’s posts, or websites.
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Send the URL of the image in question and a message to the webmaster on websites featuring your child’s image, requesting that the image be removed.
Since your experience may vary when asking people you don’t know to remove images from their websites, you can take steps to negate searches for your child’s images by removing them from Google search results . Using this form, you can submit links to images so that they do not appear in search results. (Note: This will not remove the image from individual websites, but it will no longer appear in Google search or image searches.)
Could there be other images that you didn’t even know existed? Or worse, altered images showing your child’s face in scenarios that never actually happened? Of course, this is within the realm of possibility. If technology can make it possible to use images of children, shouldn’t it make it easier to remove those images?
Unfortunately (or fortunately?), two popular public facial recognition services, PimEyes and FaceCheck , have banned image searches of people under 18 years of age. (However, you can use them to find your own adult face and therefore find out how deep you and people who look strangely like you have penetrated the network.)
Still not satisfied that you have removed all images of your child from the internet and protected their privacy? You can skip the DIY approach and hire services or enterprising individuals to scour the Internet for mentions or images of your baby.
Ultimately, how realistic is it to think that you can “take back” or control what happens to children’s images online once they are posted? The further images move beyond your control, the more you’ll need the cooperation of webmasters and platforms to bring them back—and they’ll base decisions on their own judgment, terms of service, and privacy laws. Let this problem motivate you to stop posting images of your child.