We’ve all seen a post on social media, picturing a newborn baby, along with their thoughtfully picked out name, and date of birth.
Known as birth announcements, there are 375,000 of these posts on Instagram alone from parents joyfully sharing the birth of their child.
Take Molly-Mae and Tommy Fury who’s birth announcement hit 3.5 million likes on Instagram. It’s part of a wider trend called ‘sharenting’ where mums and dads share their baby’s personal information on social media, but a parenting coach has shared the hidden problem with sharing your children’s details.
Lucinda Rose, took to TikTok, saying: ‘Birth announcements and birthday posts on social media are two of the most dangerous things a parent can put on social media.
‘What [criminals] need is data, because by taking data they can commit identity theft. They need our full name and date of birth. What do parents always put on social media as soon as they have a baby? Their full name and date of birth.’
Barclays has also warned of this problems, saying fraudsters are always on the look out for personal information, including your name and date of birth, as well as your address, marital status, email address and bank details.
What if you share your child’s information on social media?
If you’ve done a birth announcement like this with your child’s name and date of birth, the bank warns these details could be used for fraudulent loans, credit card transactions, or online shopping scams.
This means your child could struggle to get loans or even a mortgage, because someone has taken out loans or credit in their name.
If you’re still sceptical, Barclays forecasts that birth announcements, and parents sharing their children on social media, will account for two thirds of identity fraud facing young people by 2030.
There are expected to be 7.4 million incidents per year of identity fraud in four years’ time by the end of the decade.
‘Through social media, it has never been easier for fraudsters to gather the key pieces of information required to steal someone’s identity,’ Jodie Gilbert, head of digital safety for Barclays, says.
‘It’s vital to think before you post, and to carry out regular audits of your social media accounts to prevent that information from falling into the wrong hands.’
But if you look at your own social media accounts, you might realise you share a lot more of your life than you think you do. Barclays shares that parents are unwittingly revealing their ages, home addresses, places of birth, maiden names, schools, names of pets, and sports teams they support.
What do people think about birth announcements?
Some parents who initially did a birth announcement for their child have since shared they regret doing so.
‘We shared full name, date of birth and a picture with her face but honestly I wish I hadn’t,’ says one parent on Reddit. ‘I just didn’t think it through and only did it because I’d seen friends do it and in the moment I just wasn’t thinking critically about why it might not be a good idea, only that it was a thing that people do.
‘I’ve since realised that no one is actually entitled to photos of her or information about her, and the only pictures I have posted since are of me without her face showing (usually me wearing her in a carrier).’
‘I felt awful when I realised how careless it was and I would never do it again,’ TikToker Imogen says.
[‘My birth announcement] was one of the only things I’ve ever posted about my baby and now I’ve got to delete that, too. I’m sick of the world we live in,’ added one father.
‘I removed the date and the weights and their full name, I was so naïve to post them at first,’ added another.
But for those parents who did want to post birth announcements, they shared their reasoning, too.
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‘I posted it all, it was like a birth announcement,’ wrote one Reddit. ‘There was only one pic of her face, the rest were pics of me, dad & grandma holding her.
‘I think you should share whatever you’re comfortable with sharing. For me, I wanted everyone to “meet” her.’
Another parent said: ‘My partner and I only posted because our families were posting non-stop and it seemed weird that we didn’t. He made a Facebook post and I made an Instagram post.’
‘I posted a couple pictures on my private FB/IG account with his name and birth date, and that’s all that’s going to be on social media until he’s old enough to have his own accounts,’ added someone else.
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