When hearing the expression "electronic child abduction," the first reaction is one of wonder. How can a child be abducted through a computer? In reality, the term has to do with the theft of photos of young children that social media users frequently upload.
However, since the internet is vulnerable to the actions of pedophiles and child molesters, this poses risks, as the... path that the photos follow is uncontrolled.
A typical example is the one reported in the New York Times of a family from the US who saw the photos they had taken during their vacation and posted on Facebook end up in a grocery store advertisement in the Czech Republic.
The examples are endless and horrifying. The American magazine Fast Company uses the term "digital baby kidnapping" to explain the phenomenon of stealing baby photos on Instagram.
The practice of pedophiles is relatively well-defined. As New247 notes, accounts that operate as “digital adoption agencies” by anonymous users or users who have their information “locked,” where other users can “adopt” the depicted children whose photos have been stolen by users.
“Jenny had 20 new followers on Instagram, a strange buzz for a mother of three from New Carolina. Then two women messaged her, telling her they saw her baby on another user’s account, named Nikki. The woman in question was presenting Jenny’s baby as her own, giving it a different name,” the magazine reports.
Users like Nikki steal photos of other users’ children, give them a different name, and market them as their own, thus living another life, stepping into the role of the mother. Very often, they create entire fake families. So other users comment on the photos, and there is interaction.
Source: techit.gr
