A Utah mom was shocked to find photos of her children “all over at least 11 porn sites” after making a startling discovery on social media last week.
Brittany Champagne of Riverton stumbled across photos of herself, her 8-year-old daughter and her 9-year-old son on Instagram last Wednesday. The photos were accompanied by captions that misrepresented her daughter's age and sexual orientation, she told Utah's KUTV, and included hashtags linked to porn sites.
“I seriously feel like the worst mom having have put these on there and seeing what happened,” she said. “I didn't feel that posting family photos could turn into something like that.”
Champagne wasn't sure who stole the photos to begin with, telling the station they appear to have been pulled from her Facebook page, which is only visible to her friends. She's since restricted the privacy settings on her social media accounts and is trying to get every photo she can find taken down.
In March, Yahoo Parenting tracked down the stories of several moms who say they also had their kids' photos stolen off Facebook in similar "digital kidnappings."
One mom, a Nashville woman who asked to be identified only as "Ashley B," said she first noticed something was amiss when a stranger shared one of her Facebook photos. She clicked through to a page that was in Chinese.
"I couldn’t read any of it but I saw that he had a few thousand followers and he had shared my picture. I started scrolling and noticed he had lots of pictures of little girls. I was so scared and shocked,” Ashley said. “I knew privacy settings were not locked down as much as they could be, but I wasn’t really concerned about it.” She has since restricted all of her privacy settings.
The National Children's Advocacy Center cautions that "privacy is a myth in social media," and, in addition to telling parents to think twice about what they share online, encourages them to discuss safe online habits with their kids as well.
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