Sharenting: What Your Kids’ Photos Tell Strangers

Picture a first-day-of-school photo on the doorstep. The chalkboard sign gives a name, an age, a class and a teacher. The jumper carries the school badge. The house number sits over one shoulder, and the post goes up before the child has reached the gate. Nothing in it is unusual, and none of it was meant for strangers.

Sharing family photos has real value: in a US poll by the University of Michigan’s C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital, 72% of parents of young children said social media helped them feel they were not alone. This guide is not an argument against posting. It shows what a photo of your child can tell a stranger, and how to take most of it out.

Sharenting is usually done with the best of intentions, as the Southampton researchers acknowledge, and the unease about it is not new. In that Mott poll, run in late 2014 among 569 parents of children under five, 74% of those on social media knew a parent who had shared too much about a child, and 51% knew one who had posted details that could identify a child’s location.

The Southampton study links sharenting to cyberbullying, online harassment, identity theft and fraud, privacy breaches and contact by a stranger. One in six parents in its survey said their child had experienced at least one of these harms.

Of all the dangers of posting kids’ photos online, location deserves the closest look, because it hides in plain sight:

No single clue is dramatic, but they add up: a badge names a school, a street sign names a neighbourhood, and a post at the same time every week names a routine. That is how photos are located without GPS data, and the main geolocation guide shows how far each method goes.

Apple’s safety guide is blunt: when photos with location metadata are shared, the people you share them with may be able to learn where they were taken. Smartphone GPS is typically accurate to within 4.9 m under open sky, according to GPS.gov, which is close enough to single out a home. That is why a geotag is the first privacy risk to check.

Whether the tag survives depends on the route. Publishing to a social feed usually strips it; sending the original file often keeps it. The platform-by-platform guide explains the rule, and removing location before you share shows how on iPhone, Android, Windows and Mac.

The tag is the easy part. The picture still shows the badge and the street, and AI geolocation tools, including GeoSpy on this site, read exactly that evidence: architecture, signage, vegetation and road markings. How AI geolocation works explains the method, and why the honest result is a city, not an address.

In August 2026, police in Sterlington, Louisiana, warned about the dangers of posting back-to-school photos. First-day signs often list a child’s school, teacher, age and interests, details that let someone with bad intentions “quickly build unearned trust with a child”. Their fix keeps the photo: a sign that just says “First Day of School”, a tight frame or a blurred background, no school logos, and a private account.

Researchers and charities say the same. The University of Southampton issued its warning about sharenting dangers as the new school year loomed and “thousands of back-to-school photos of children in their uniforms” were going online. The Internet Watch Foundation asks parents to check every post: “Can my child’s face, body or school uniform be seen?”

The forecast, reported by the BBC, came to 7.4 million incidents and £667 million a year by 2030. It is a projection, not a count, but the mechanism is concrete. The bank warned that names, ages and birth dates from birthday posts, home addresses, mother’s maiden names, schools and pets’ names can be misused to hack passwords, or for fraudulent loans and card transactions once the child is an adult.

Photos also travel further than intended. In 2024, Human Rights Watch found 190 photos of Australian children in LAION-5B, a dataset used to train popular AI tools, after checking fewer than 0.0001% of its 5.85 billion images and captions. One caption named two preschoolers, their ages and their preschool in Perth; another image came from an “unlisted” YouTube video. LAION pledged to remove them.

That reach is why the UK’s National Crime Agency and the Internet Watch Foundation issued new guidance for parents in July 2026: offenders are exploiting openly available images of children to create sexual abuse imagery with AI. Their answer is not a ban. “We don’t want to say don’t share your children’s images with the people you love and trust,” said the IWF’s chief executive, Kerry Smith, “but we want everyone to be aware of the potential risks and make an informed decision with the full facts at their disposal.”

Children have their own views. In a 2016 University of Washington and University of Michigan study of 249 families with children aged 10 to 17, twice as many children as parents worried about family members oversharing about them without permission. One rule the children wanted parents to follow: “Stop posting photos of me without my permission.”

France’s law of 19 February 2024 makes privacy part of parental authority. Parents protect their child’s image rights jointly and involve the child “in accordance with their age and degree of maturity”. If they disagree, a family judge can bar either parent from “publishing or disseminating any content concerning the child without the other parent’s permission”.

Illinois took a different route, through money. Since 1 July 2024, a child under 16 who appears in at least 30% of a family vlogger’s paid videos in a 30-day period is owed a share of the earnings, held in trust until they turn 18.

What changes the answer most is the audience. A photo in the family group chat is a different act from a public post. Private settings help, but they are not a wall: the Southampton researchers found that tagging and resharing can override them, because if anyone is tagged, their friends can see, copy and reshare the post.

Settings also change. The Mott poll warned that what is shared privately today is not necessarily private in the future, as platforms’ policies change. And 52% of its parents worried that their child might one day be embarrassed by what they had shared, which is a fair test for any post.

1. Step 1Turn off locationOn iPhone, set Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services → Camera to Never, or turn Location off under Options in the share sheet each time you share. On Android, look in the camera settings for Save location (Google) or Location tags (Samsung). The EXIF removal guide covers older photos.
2. Step 2Read the background like a strangerLook past your child: a school badge or lanyard, the house number, a car plate, a street sign, the view from a window. Crop, blur or take another shot.
3. Step 3Keep signs and captions vague“First Day of School” is enough. Use a first name or a nickname, and leave out the surname, birth date, school and teacher.
4. Step 4Post after, not duringA live post or location tag shows where your child is now; a post from the same pitch every Saturday shows where they will be next week. Share the day out once you are home. A running or cycling app can map the same routine, so check what a teenager’s Strava shows.
5. Step 5Choose the audienceUse a private account, a close-friends list or the family group chat, and remember that tags and reshares can carry a post beyond it.
6. Step 6Check group photosParty and team photos include other people’s children. The IWF advises double-checking before posting group photos, and a message to the other parents does it.
7. Step 7Ask your childOnce your child can say how they feel about a photo, ask before you post, and help them understand, in the IWF’s words, that “it’s okay to say no”.
8. Step 8Audit what is already onlineOnce a year, scroll back through your posts and ask relatives to check theirs. Barclays gave the same advice in 2018: “carry out regular audits of your social media accounts”.

On geospys.com, photo analysis comes with a GeoSpy Premium subscription: 7.99 US dollars a week or 29.99 US dollars a year, renewing until you cancel. Each estimate is a city and a country, never an address. If it lands on your own town, crop tighter or choose another photo.