On social networks, parents pay attention to photos, faces, places. However, information shared almost mechanically would present a major risk.
Instagram has more than 375,000 such posts under a single hashtag. Posts that sometimes garner millions of “likes”. This way of telling your children’s lives online has a name, “sharenting”, and it has become established in practice. Show an important moment, make an event official, write a few lines and click “publish”. The gesture seems obvious and yet it is particularly dangerous.
Parenting advisor Lucinda Rose recently issued an alert on TikTok. She does not talk about compromising images or misinterpreted videos. It targets a specific type of information, integrated almost automatically into these publications. According to her, these posts are some of the riskiest content for children. His reasoning is direct: digital fraudsters are not looking for endearing memories, they are looking for exploitable elements. Data that allows you to open an account, take out credit or build a credible fictitious identity.
Barclays bank shares this analysis and recalls that scammers constantly collect personal information available online. Name, address, family situation, electronic contact details: every detail can be useful. The more this information is accessible and consistent with each other, the simpler the usurpation becomes to implement. “Thanks to social media, it has never been easier for fraudsters to gather the key information needed to impersonate someone.”says Jodie Gilbert, head of digital security at Barclays. She emphasizes a simple point: think before publishing and regularly check your privacy settings.
The problem with a child’s identity is that it can be exploited for a long time without detection. A loan opened fraudulently in one’s name will often only be discovered when applying for a first loan, sometimes years later. In the meantime, the data has circulated, been resold, cross-referenced with other publicly available information. Many parents are unaware that, taken together, certain details are enough to constitute a complete administrative profile. Because, indeed, “Birth announcements followed by the child’s full name on social media are two of the most dangerous things a parent can post on social media”alerts Lucinda Rose.
These two administrative pieces of information combined are enough to lay the foundations for identity theft. And when the figures reveal that 7.4 million cases of identity theft could be recorded each year by the end of the decade, it is all the more incentive to review our online practices.
