Posting Naked Baby Photos Online – Do or Don’t?

What parent hasn’t taken a cute photo of their tot splashing around in the tub? Or playing in the sand at the beach wearing nothing but a diaper? Every day moms and dads capture and share these precious moments on Facebook, Flickr, or other online galleries.
 
MSNBC.com recently ran an interesting article that explores the two-fold dilemma parents face when posting pictures of their children “in varying degrees of undress” online.
 
One mom on our community forums was “horrified” to find her daughter’s image turn up in Google search after posting it on her Facebook profile. The photos “were being indexed by search engines,” she wrote. “I found my kids pictured strewn across the internet for all to see.”
 
Worrying about whether these pictures will end up in the hands of sexual predators is only part of the problem; some parents have even faced criminal charges for photos that were deemed pornographic. Earlier this year, a Utah mom was charged with two counts of sexual exploitation of a minor after snapping a shot of her boyfriend with their naked infant son—a photo which was reported to police by a pharmacy photo technician. The charges were later dropped after police determined that the father was merely kissing the boy after his bath, but by then the child had been removed from the family’s home.
 
It gives modern parents a lot to think about before clicking “share.”
 
What do you think? How do you determine which baby photos to share, and which ones to keep offline?