Parents have been advised not to expose the identity of their children on social media platforms by posting their pictures and names of their schools.
“The identity of children should be protected — the name of the child, image and any description that will make people identify the child should not be made known to strangers,” cautioned DSP Freeman Tettey of the Public Affairs Directorate at the Headquarters of the Ghana Police Service in Accra.
He said a stranger with all that information about a child could decide to kidnap him/her and start demanding money from very wealthy parents and that could put the child’s life at risk.
DSP Tettey, who spoke to the Junior Graphic, added that criminals could edit the photographs of children posted on social media platforms and use them to commit crime.
It is now very common on social media sites such as Facebook and Whatsapp to find parents using the images of their children as their profile pictures or publishing the various activities their children engage in on their walls.
Some even go to the extent of publishing the pictures of the children in their school uniforms. Adolescents have not been left out of this craze, as they go to the extent of publishing the names of their schools, where they are at every point in time for friends online to see.
DSP Tettey warned that for safety and security reasons parents and adolescents must be careful not to make public some sensitive information about themselves and their children online.
He said although there had not been any recorded case of crime linked to the posting of children’s pictures online, “we should not wait for such incidents to happen before we start doing the right things.”
“Since Ghana is part of the global village, we should be concerned. There have been instances where children have been kidnapped, trafficked, killed for ritual purposes or disappeared under strange circumstances, but we cannot link these crimes to the publication of pictures of children online,” he added.
