All the Ways to Remove Your Kid’s Image From the Internet
Maybe you didn’t exactly go to Halle Bailey lengths to conceal your child’s existence from the internet, and now you regret years of “sharenting” online. Can you unring that bell? No guarantees, but we’ve rounded up some starting strategies for tracking down and removing images of your child from the internet.
Reasons to keep their faces offline
Whether your adolescent is embarrassed by old baby photos on Facebook, or you're concerned about nefarious people using AI to turn your child’s image into something terrifying, there are lots of reasons to make your best effort at scrubbing their photos from the internet.
Dr. Tali Shenfield, school and clinical psychologist, wrote about the big reasons parents should not share photos of children online:
Young kids can’t consent.
Adolescents prefer to control their own digital presence to preserve privacy and autonomy.
Photos can become fuel for bullies to use in the future.
Metadata attached to photos reveals personal information beyond the image itself.
Images and metadata can be used for identity theft and digital kidnapping (when someone uses photos of your child to claim they are their child).
Where to start finding 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-purging project in the sphere of control where you have the most power (and will probably find most of the photos): your own social media, blogs, forums, and websites. We all have anxiety about what can happen to a child’s photos when they are released into the wild and get snagged by the wrong person. You can greatly reduce the odds of that happening by deleting your trail of photos that probably began leaking onto social media (even in private or friends-only groups) right after baby was born.
Clean out your own photo albums on Facebook, delete posts on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok. If any of your accounts are dominated by information about your child, delete the whole thing. Put your memories on a hard drive or in a scrapbook.
Think back to all the “What to Expect” forums and anxious parent message boards you have posted on in the past. Delete your accounts, especially if you ever posted maybe just the cutest, most innocent, now deeply embarrassing photo of your toddler.
Did you think for a tiny minute that you would make your mark as a mommy blogger? Even if you created a teensy blog just for family members to keep up with news about your child, it’s time to take that stuff down.
However, a lot of our kids’ images on the internet originate from sources outside our own accounts. Next, you’ll get to work on contacting the people you know (friends and family) and people you sort of know (school, church, clubs, social groups) who may have innocently taken photos of your child and posted them online in the past.
If you are aware of specific photos, send a link via DM to the person or group on Facebook, Instagram, etc, asking them politely but firmly to delete the identifying photo. Ask close friends and family (those most likely to be cooperative and most likely to have photos) to browse through their own albums and delete any photos of your child.
If you know there are existing photos of your child on social media but you haven’t gotten a response by asking the account holder to remove it, each platform has a process for requesting image removal.
On Facebook, fill out a 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.
On Instagram, you can also fill out a form to report an image of your child. Instagram determines whether to act on your request depending on privacy laws and whether the photo violates community guidelines.
On TikTok, use this form to report a privacy violation.
Finally, how do you identify and take down images of your child that exist elsewhere on the internet? Unfortunately, you don’t know what you don’t know. Start by finding out what any rando could dig up on Google.
Search your child’s name and your name on Google to see if any images you didn’t know about turn up.
Try variations of search terms including names, city, school, club, church, or social group. This may turn up images that were posted on individual websites.
Use Google to reverse image search any pictures you previously identified from your own social media, other people’s posts, or websites.
Send the relevant image URL and a message to the webmaster on websites with your child’s picture asking them to remove the image.
Because your mileage may vary when it comes to asking people you don’t know to remove images from their websites, you can take steps to subvert searches for your child’s image by having them removed from Google search results. With this form, you can submit links to the images so they don’t show up in search results. (Note: this does not remove the image from individual websites, but it will no longer show up in a Google search or image search.)
Could there be other images out there that you never knew existed? Or worse, altered images that show your child’s face in scenarios that never actually happened? Sure, it’s within the realm of possibility. If technology can make the exploitation of a child’s image possible, shouldn’t it make taking down those images easier?
Unfortunately (or fortunately?), two popular open-to-the-public facial recognition services, PimEyes and FaceCheck, have banned searching for images of people under 18. (You can, however, use them to search for your own adult face and consequently find out how deeply you and people who look uncannily like you have infiltrated the web.)
Still not satisfied that you have removed all images of your child from the internet and protected their privacy? You can abandon the DIY approach and hire services or enterprising individuals who will scour and scrub the internet for references to or images of your child.
Ultimately, how realistic is it to think you can “take back” or control what happens to children’s images online once they are posted? The farther images leak outside your sphere of control, the more you will need the cooperation of webmasters and platforms to reel them back in—and they will base decisions on their own judgment, terms of service, and privacy laws. Let this hassle be your motivation to skip sharing images of your child in the first place.