NCERT asks pre-schools to protect kids’ privacy online: Parents and schools need to wake up to dangers of social media
Watch what you post, because other, dangerous eyes are.
For a lot of people, children’s cute videos on the Internet make the World Wide Web a better place. For the children, however, it makes the real world a more dangerous place.
While the risks of “sharenting” — parents sharing personal information of their kids on social media — have been a subject of debate for long, there are other ways children’s pictures and videos make their way to the Internet, exposing them to the many, many dangers present online.
Recognising this, the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) has asked pre-schools across the country to keep privacy concerns in mind while recording audio or video clips of their students.
According to a report in the Hindustan Times, the NCERT included this aspect after “a number of states had pointed out that some pre-schools make videos and audios of students and share them on the social media without the consent of parents.”
Why is this important?
Picture this.
Videos of your adorable children reciting a poem are shared on their pre-school’s website, or on its Facebook page. The post gets likes and comments, ensuring more people come across it. What is effectively happening is that a bunch of strangers — anyone on Facebook, or anyone who looks up the school’s website — now know what school the children go to, at what time are they likely to leave school for home or would be found outside the school, possibly even getting to know their name.
All of this information makes the children terribly easy targets for someone who would want to abduct them — even sexually assault them.
A report in The Lantern Project, a UK-based charity that works with children who have been sexually abused, quotes a 10-year-old study on inmates of Tihar Jail to claim that nearly 80 per cent paedophiles spent a lot of time lurking outside schools.
According to NCRB data for 2016, 59 per cent rape victims in India were minors.
In the June Mandsaur rape case which rocked the nation, the child was abducted from outside her school.
While this is scary enough, this is not the only reason your children’s photos and videos should not be knocking about on the Internet.
While parents sharing their children’s photos are likely to ensure that only friends and family can access them — if they don’t, they should — a pre-school sharing videos will automatically make it available to more people, including strangers.
And the risks this exposes them to include the pictures ending up on porn sites, “digital kidnapping”, identity theft, and of course, violation of a child’s privacy.
In 2015, several British parents found that pictures of their children, shared on social media by friends and relatives, had been posted on a website used by Russian paedophiles. According to a report in The Telegraph, “Most of the images are accompanied by inappropriate comments from users across the world, which show they are being used for sexual gratification.”
“Digital kidnapping” is a phenomenon where a child’s pictures are “stolen” by a user on social media, who then passes them off as pictures of their own child, or of themselves. The reasons can range from a hunger for likes and positive comments, to more sinister ones, such as chatting with paedophiles.
Identity theft of a toddler would involve stealing their data — name, address, parents’ name, school — to create fake identity documents such as passports.
And there is always the question of a child’s right to privacy, which even parents need to keep in mind.
You are putting into the public domain videos or photographs of someone who is too young to consent to this. With most people not too well-versed in how social media works, they are not even aware of the digital imprint they are leaving behind with the most innocuous activities.
While you may think a four-year-old fumbling over words or dancing to a song in her pre-school is cute, the child, when 14, may not agree. A video shared by a pre-school 10 years ago can survive on the Internet easily, but having it deleted might not be that easy.
While all of this may sound alarmist, as far as children’s safety is concerned, it is better to err on the side of caution.
The NCERT guideline is a step in the right direction, but it’s just a start. Both schools and parents need to be as careful about children’s safety in the virtual world as they would be in the real world.