Parents have been advised not to post pictures of their children online in a stark warning by the National Crime Agency (NCA).
Crime prevention bosses issued the advice amidst a rise in AI-generated child sexual abuse imagery, telling parents “there is no protection”.
Guidance from the NCA and child safety watchdog the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) says adults should consider limiting access to any photos of their children online through “close friends” lists and keep their accounts private.
First reported by The Guardian, the advice also recommends going back through social media accounts for old pictures that could be used by offenders, and considering photo consent agreements that could have been made before recent developments in AI-generated imagery.
Dan Sexton, the IWF’s chief technology officer, told the paper he was “very uncomfortable” about telling parents not to put pictures of children on public display but felt there was no other option.
“I don’t know what else to say to parents,” he said. “I would be very cautious [about putting pictures of children online] because there is no protection.”
The IWF’s head of marketing, Tom Dyson, added: “If you want a photograph of your children to be taken off a website or social media you are perfectly able to do that.”
The NCA warned most parents would not be aware that predators can now create child sexual abuse material (CSAM) without needing to interact with a child at all.
“The average parent or carer does not post a picture of a child online thinking that it might be scraped to be turned into CSAM,” said Lorna Sinclair, a child sexual abuse education manager at the NCA. “There are lots of parents and carers who do not know that this problem exists.”
The foundation provides a service to report CSAM anonymously and also runs Report Remove, which works to remove explicit images from the internet.
IWF data shows the amount of AI-generated CSAM online rose by 14 per cent last year, with the majority of videos showing the most extreme kinds of content.
“AI-generated child sexual abuse material represents a significant and evolving risk, as advances in technology make it easier to produce realistic and harmful content at scale,” the foundation said earlier this year.
“It often draws on real children’s faces or bodies, either directly within the images or indirectly through the data used to train AI systems. Highly realistic material can be generated by modifying existing child sexual abuse content or by using simple prompts to create new abusive imagery within seconds, enabling rapid and large-scale production.”
The NCA and IWF guidance states: “If you’d like to share photos of your child online, we suggest creating a ‘close friends’ group or limiting visibility so only selected people can see them.”
The children’s charity NSPCC also advises under-18s keep their social media accounts on private settings.
