A new post has been published over at the Starlight Baby blog: Babysitters And Social Media – Protecting Your Child’s Privacy Would love to hear your thoughts on this topic below!
That is one worrying factor which most of us face and have discovered through spy camera set specially for this purpose. Exposure to social media is definitely not the only problem but the baby sitters have been found involved in many other serious activities which are unhealthy as well as dangerous for your babies.
I believe there should be rules set when hiring a babysitter, whether it is someone you may already know or a stranger. I know I personally would not want my child/children's photo or any other information on someone's Facebook account unless I approved what it was first. There should be a little contract between the sitter and the parents stating the rules. Thank you for the informative article.
Turning off location based features is a pretty vital request, because photos publicly shared with them reveal where your child lives to the general world. Our local playgroup doesn't disclose their location online, only over the phone to parents to prevent children being targeted, and there are a few national kids groups with similar policies. I'd think it would be perfectly reasonable to ask babysitters simply not to take photos inside your house. Private Nannycams are useful for checking up on the kids and the babysitter, but I'd never use one that wasn't on a VPN or private short-range wi-fi and inaccessible from the general web. It is too easy for someone to crack a password.
While I do agree with you, I do think that it's hard to actually enforce rules that you set when you aren't there. Many babysitters are of a younger age where social media is all part and parcel of their lives and they don't think twice about putting everything and anything on there, so to them you will be seen as worrying for nothing. They SHOULD comply with what you want, and if you find out that they HAVE posted something on to social media then you have every right to have it out with them, but more often than not you aren't even going to know which I think is more worrying. I'd also wonder if they have gone against your wishes on that, what else have they done that you told them not to?
This is the main reason I decided to be a stay at home mom right after I knew my parents weren't going to be able to care for my baby. Right after I got the news I quit my job even though I loved it but I missed my daughter most and of course her safety is first. I do not trust anyone who is not my parent to care for her not even for a few seconds to be honest. For this reason I am actually considering homeschooling her as I have seen many cases in which teachers or even students are abusive.
The article gives some valuable advise as to how we can prevent any untoward incident through social media sharing. It's obvious that there should written rules when hiring a baby sitter. There are other dangerous consequences too which we are quite unknown. First of all it is not right to share somebody's photo on site without his consent, even though he is your baby or a minor. This is only one part of the story and the gruesome part is that an unscientific survey of an online child pornography site in Australia revealed that a major part of the photos being used for this site was sourced from social networking sites shared by parents or others. Obviously they were not aware of its danger while sharing these photos. So we can't even think of a babysitter sharing photos of our babies and we never know who is on the other side scanning at those images.