Online Safety @ Your Fingertips
The Safer Schools NI app brings you vital information and support, any time, any device, anywhere.
Which Content can be Shared Online?
Good practice we encourage regarding image and video sharing applies equally to other information that can identify who and/or where you are such as:
Personal Details: telephone number, address, date of birth, bank account details etc.
Location: tagging location in a post, sharing that you will attend a future event (eg. A concert), or broadcasting your location on Snap Maps.
Content: images and videos can be shared on a range of platforms.
Accidental Information Sharing
Remember when using social media, you are in a digital environment. People can zoom into the images you post and see things in the background that you didn’t intend to share like letters, photos and documents.
It is important that everyone in a young person’s life understands the implications of sharing images or videos of them and that we all set a good example for young people to follow.
While the internet may look or feel private, it’s very much a public space. Users can be lulled into a false sense of security and become complacent with privacy settings. This heightens the risk of harm or unintended exposure of personal or sensitive information, beyond its intended audience.
According to Ofcom, children and young people are reluctant to share self-created content with larger circles of people, preferring to utilise alternative ways to do so. This includes temporary posts (such as Instagram stories), using private accounts or resharing other people’s posts as a way of ‘sending signals’ to people who view their profile (such as reposts on TikTok). Although these are ‘temporary’, they can still be screenshotted by others and are as permanent as self-created posts.