Parents are being urged to avoid using certain hashtags on social media when posting photos of their children as they can make them more vulnerable to predators.
According to David Angelo, Chairman of the Child Rescue Coalition, paedophiles are searching for tags like #BathTime, #NakedKids and #ToiletTraining to easily accessphotos of children online.
"While parents are naively posting intimate photos and details about their kids on social media, they have no idea how easily these images can be screenshot and downloaded by predators and sex offenders, who can manipulate, misuse and repost them on other sites," he said, quoted by the Daily Mail.
According to the agency, most parents will post an average 1500 photos of their child before they turn 5.
The coalition has launched a Kids For Privacy campaign to encourage parents to post a photo of their child online holding a sign that reads "privacy, please".
"The term 'sharenting' has been used to describe parents who feel the need to share almost every step of their child's life on social media, without asking them," the campaign explained.
"The end result may be a generation of children growing up who find much of their private lives have been online for years. And that may be dangerous."
Capturing special moments of your child's life and sharing them online is tempting... but be safe doing so.
The experts are also urging parents to be careful using the location tool on Instagram as it might be giving the wrong people information about your children's routines or where they are at any given time.
According to Australian parenting expert Dr Kristy Goodwin, the criminal aspect of "sharenting" is a major issue.
"It has been suggested that 50 per cent of images shared on paedophile sites have been taken from parents' social media sites. We lose full control of where our kids' photos end up when we share them online," she said in her book Raising Your Child In A Digital World.
She asks parents to be extra diligent and very selective about which photos they share online so they can have some sort of control over the child's "digital DNA".
