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WHEN proud parents post details of their children’s lives on social media sites, are they unwittingly leaving youngsters vulnerable to physical risk as well as providing crooks with data that can later be used for scams?  A University of Huddersfield cybersecurity researcher is probing an issue that she describes as “a ticking time bomb” and has launched a special survey to find out more.

Abigail McAlpine is completing a PhD project and has been gathering data about how parents and children use social media such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter.  A key area of enquiry is the information that parents share about their children.

“Most of the things that we use to authenticate ourselves will be online by the time a 12-year-old turns 18,” she said.  “For example, mother’s maiden name, first school, first pet – any of those standard questions that a bank may ask to authenticate yourself.

“I have friends that have kids who are ten-years-old now and I have seen every moment of their lives unfold online,” added Abigail.

She is concerned about the amount of information being shared online by both adults and children, leaving people vulnerable to physical and mental harm as well as financial and reputational damage.  Abigail draws a parallel with an unpleasant experience in her teens when she was stalked by a man who had seen her in her school uniform.

“He managed to figure out what school I went to, what time it finished and what buses I would be getting on and quickly figured out where I lived.  And that was without social media.”

Social media – collecting data about you

Abigail is in the final year of her doctoral project at the University of Huddersfield, where her research is supervised by the criminologist Professor Rachel Armitage and the cybersecurity expert Dr Simon Parkinson.  She is gathering data via online surveys that are collecting responses from parents of children in secondary school, asking about parents’ own social media use and sharing of information, and also asking how their children use the platforms.

There has already been a substantial response to the surveys, but Abigail would like a bigger sample from the general public before she analyses the data for her thesis.  People who take the surveys do so anonymously unless they would like to take part in follow-up interviews.

Abigail did a degree in Business Studies at the University of Huddersfield before embarking on her PhD.  She worked as a marketing manager during her first degree and that provided a catalyst for the doctoral project.

“I saw the amount of information that was being collated by various analytic systems and realised that far too much of it was unnecessary,” said Abigail, who now rations the information that she posts about herself.

“I make a separation between my personal and professional life as less is more when it comes to personal.  But there is a lot of encouragement to share things in real time, which I think for children is a real issue.  A lot of children’s profiles are actually public and they give higher priority to engagement and likes rather than considering the safety and privacy issues associated with sharing their information publicly online.