Do not put pictures of your children online, National Crime Agency warns parents
The National Crime Agency (NCA) has issued a stern warning to parents not to post photos of their children online.
Crime prevention bosses have advised parents, saying there is “no protection whatsoever” at a time when AI-generated images of child sexual abuse are on the rise.
Guidance from the NCA and child safety watchdog Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) says adults should consider limiting access to their children’s online photos through “close friends” lists and keep their accounts private.
First reported GuardThe advice also recommends revisiting social media accounts for old images that could be used by criminals and considering photo consent agreements that may have been made before the latest advances in AI-generated images.
Dan Sexton, IWF’s chief technology officer, told the newspaper he was “very uncomfortable” telling parents not to display children’s images in public, but felt there was no other option.
“I don’t know what else to tell parents,” she said. “I would be very careful [about putting pictures of children online] Because there is no protection.”
IWF chief marketing officer Tom Dyson added: “If you want a photo of your children removed from a website or social media, you can certainly do that.”
The NCA has warned that most parents will not be aware that predators can now create child sexual abuse material (CSAM) without needing to interact with a child.
“The average parent or carer does not post an image of a child online thinking it could be scraped to be turned into CSAM,” said Lorna Sinclair, director of child sexual exploitation education at the NCA. “There are a lot of parents and caregivers who don’t know this problem exists.”
The Foundation provides a service to anonymously report CSAM and also operates Report Removal, which works to remove sexually explicit images from the internet.
IWF data shows that the amount of AI-generated online CSAM increased by 14 percent last year, with the majority of videos showing the most extreme types of content.
“AI-generated child sexual abuse material represents a significant and evolving risk, as advances in technology make it easier for realistic and harmful content to be produced at scale,” the foundation said in a statement earlier this year.
“It often draws on real children’s faces or bodies directly from within the images or indirectly through data used to train AI systems. Highly realistic materials can be created by modifying existing child sexual abuse content or creating new abusive images in seconds using simple prompts, allowing for rapid, large-scale production.”
NCA and IWF guidance states: “If you want to share your child’s photos online, we recommend creating a ‘close friends’ group or limiting visibility to only selected people.”
Children’s charity NSPCC also recommends that under-18s keep their social media accounts private.
