Parents Told To Send Letters To Schools To Get Kids’ Images Removed Online

An online harms expert and therapist has urged parents to contact their children’s schools to get any images of them removed online.

Catherine Knibbs shared earlier in the week that cyber criminals are taking photos of children from school websites and social media, and then manipulating them with AI to make child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

Schools are then being blackmailed to send money to stop the images from being shared.

“I’ve personally worked on cases like this as a child trauma and online harms expert – and the cases are sickening,” said Knibbs at the time.

And she warned it’s not just photos uploaded to school websites that are at risk of being taken and manipulated, it’s family photos shared on social media, too.

Her warning came after the National Crime Agency issued an alert in late April to hundreds of thouss of teachers over a “considerable increase” in financially motivated sexual extortion (sextortion).

After her first video was viewed over six million times, Knibbs shared an update urging parents not to wait for the government or tech companies to do something to tackle this growing problem.

“I have been inundated with requests for this … in the United Kingdom and Europe, you have the right to withdraw consent for your child’s images to be used by a setting, which includes schools, gymnastics, scouts, rugby, football, dance, you name it,” she explained in a new video.

“It also includes removing the permission to post on social media and the website and in advertisements and local newspapers.”

The expert has created a free template of a letter parents can fill in and hand over (physically, not via email unless it’s encrypted, she advised) to their children’s schools.

In response to her video, lots of parents commented on how, when they refused consent for their child’s images to be shared online, they were treated as “awkward” for doing so.

One parent said: “We never gave consent for pictures of our children to be used by any organisation and were treated as insane and awkward and difficult by most of them!

Another commented: “I have four children and I never gave consent for their pictures to be on Facebook or on the school website… some teachers did comment that this made taking photos of events very tricky and thought that I was overreacting… always been a bad idea.”

One parent noted how, after opting out of having images shared from day one of their child attending school, the headteacher “couldn’t understand my reasoning at all”.

They ended: “Schools do not need to use images of children’s faces to promote their settings.”

Some parents have already tried to tackle the issue. One mum created Aidos – a safeguarding platform that makes every pupil in a school photograph permanently unidentifiable before the image is shared online.

She previously shared on HuffPost UK: “Schools can keep sharing everything they have always shared. The difference is that those images can no longer be used to harm the children within them.”