Hello, my name is Tammy Anson and I am the Chief Operations Officer at pixevety.
With personal data breach announcements occurring daily around the world, I wanted to quickly share my thoughts on data security, specifically when it comes to child photo storage, and to reiterate that pixevety has been carefully designed to ensure photo security and protection of children in the online world.
The world has exploded with photo and video sharing. At the same time, the sharing of child abuse material online has risen astronomically since 2020 and campaigners are accusing big tech of “absolutely failing children”.
People will continue to share images of their loved ones and friends on these open public channels, and so the best way to curtail your child’s images being used inappropriately by others is to ensure you have clearly communicated your consent (when asked), and that you encourage schools and other organisations to use technology that filters photos on consent before sharing or publishing, and that allow parents to have access and control over their children’s photos – as they say, “Technology has caused a problem that only technology can fix!”.
Why is it so important, especially now?
pixevety was started over 10 years ago because my family had a fear that others were not using my young daughter’s photos in a way that respected our wishes – be it at school, during community sport or at social events. Sometimes, as parents, we were asked for consent, but most times not. When we were asked, we wondered if we were being asked the right questions (many times social media was left off the list) and whether our responses would be managed correctly. Could a simple paper form handed out once a year or during the lifetime of a child at school really protect my child’s digital footprint over time?
Parents had very little control ten years ago, so we built pixevety…yet today, we continue to hear that many schools haven’t changed their habits even with safer technology, the strengthening of privacy laws or increased fines.
“My school assured me my daughter’s photos would not end up on Facebook and that it was literally their job to make sure that kids without consent didn’t end up being published by the school… I then see my daughter’s face on Facebook during a school excursion…I complained. They fixed it by blurring out her face…then it happened again!”
“As parents we are constantly being sent home permission notes that use jargon and made to sound legal. What it does is confuse parents, who then sign it not really understanding what they signed. Most of these forms can be summed up with ‘we have permission to take photos of your child at any time and use those photos how we wish, for as long as we wish, anywhere we wish’
“Schools and businesses are so focused on getting social media content they are forgetting that the children’s safety and ability to enjoy participating in an activity should be the priority”
Source: Facebook
How does a product like pixevety help schools with managing photos?
To keep what our product does simple, I’ve listed its main features below:
- A system that allows a school to host its own private photo gallery online in a highly secure local private enterprise cloud environment.
- Each gallery contains its own locked-down facial recognition technology, completely owned, and managed by the school, never shared with any third-party vendor, that is solely used for student identification so the school can attach their photo consent to every photo uploaded into the school Gallery. Whether it is a single photo or a group photo, the strictest setting will always be applied.
- We hired a privacy consultant to design an online photo consent form which details the various levels of consent required by the school to manage student photos within the gallery and outside of the gallery/school, so that a school can comply not only with Australian data law but the Global Data Protection Regulation (the strictest data regulation to date).
- We built an online consent module so schools can easily give parents informed access to school media use and the ability to use an online photo consent form to make changes at any time, in real time, on their child’s photos across the gallery.
- We built in specific roles to enable parents/legal guardians who don’t want their child’s photos shared within the school (i.e., foster children), with school families or beyond the school, so they can continue to access, view and enjoy their child’s photos privately or with other families of children also published in an image, and it is made clear that these images are ‘Do Not Publish’ to everyone who has access to them.
- We built an auditing system so a school can track photo consent and keep up to date when a parent has changed their mind, as settings are automatically managed in real-time in the gallery.
- We built safer sharing components that allow schools to share everything – that has consent – both privately and publicly, with their school community, such as big end-of-year events, and give parents access to photos of their children via a one-click VIP button so they don’t miss out on precious daily school moments.
As an Australian owned and based company, we are very proud of the safe and innovative product we have built over the last ten years to better serve Australian families and protect schools and children. Our initial success now amplified overseas in the United States, Canada, and Asia.
We have done all this by ensuring we remain fully compliant, driven by privacy-by-design principles and by selecting the leading, most trusted partners who believe in, and support, our company privacy and security ethos. We constantly review our internal processes to make sure that we are ahead of the game!
Protecting your photo data privacy & security
Please continue to ask yourself (and your school, club, etc.): Are you aware that your photos are classified as personal information requiring protection? (It is the one piece of data that can give away tons of insight on a person). Do you know where you have stored all your photos? Do you trust that company or service? Do you know where they are being stored or how they are being handled and/or shared? Is the location somewhere with equivalent privacy protections? Have you permitted your photos to be used for commercial purposes? Does the storage provider share or give away your photos to other vendors as part of “providing or improving the service”?
Knowing all this before selecting a photo management provider is critical to ensuring your data is kept safe.
Thank you for reading this blog.
