Why Children Deserve Privacy Before They Can Choose It

At Team Chip, we recently made the decision to stop posting front-facing, identifiable images of children on social media. At its core, this is all about privacy and consent.

Privacy is not secrecy. Privacy is stewardship. It is the responsibility adults carry when caring for someone who cannot yet protect themselves.

Children cannot meaningfully consent to having their image shared online. Consent requires understanding long-term consequences, permanence, and reach. Young children do not have the capacity to evaluate what it means for their face, name, or likeness to exist publicly on the internet potentially forever.

Yet in today’s culture, children often have a digital presence before they can speak. Photos are shared casually, frequently, and with good intentions. But intent does not change reality. Once an image is posted publicly, control over that image is diminished or lost entirely.

Even when accounts are private, images can be:

• Saved or screenshotted

• Copied or redistributed

• Archived or stored by platforms and third parties

Privacy settings limit visibility, not permanence.

As an organization that works with children, we believe it is our responsibility to go beyond what is common or convenient. We believe this is just one part of our role to be stewards of trust. Choosing not to share children’s faces publicly is a way of honoring that trust.

Scripture reminds us that “whoever is faithful in very little is also faithful in much” (Luke 16:10). Decisions that may seem small, like whether or not to post a photo, reflect much larger values.

Children deserve the right to step into the world without a public digital identity already built for them. Until they are old enough to choose for themselves, our role is to protect that right.