With the Easter holidays approaching and nannies all over the globe preparing to travel with their employers, we thought it would be a prudent time to remind our nannies of the social media mishaps that could put their employers’ and their children’s safety in jeopardy. The wonderful and equally perilous thing about social media is the immediacy of it: at the touch of a screen you can inform thousands of people of your whereabouts, and sometimes we do this without really realising it.
Resist The Urge to Check-In Chances are, you’re off somewhere lovely for a few days or even a few weeks with your employers. We’re used to seeing our friends ‘checking in’ at the airport through their Facebook status updates, sometimes adding extra details about where in the world they’re jetting off to. By telling your social media audience that you’re off travelling with your employers, you are in fact giving out very sensitive information about where your employers – and most crucially, their precious children – are at that precise moment. Many of our nannies work with high profile families who could become targets – to paparazzi and fans at best - and in giving out your exact coordinates you are indirectly telling your audience precisely where to find them, and their children. It goes without saying that in doing this you are also alerting people to the fact that their home may be unoccupied for some time. Need we say more?
Don’t Add Locations to Instagram Posts We’ve blogged before about keeping your work off social media for all manner of professional and security reasons, but if you must share images of your travels then the same rules as above must apply. By adding a location tag to your Instagram images, you are telling your audience – of millions of users if your account isn’t private – where you are at that moment. The same goes for geotagging your Tweets, which is something many Twitter users do without realising it. Pictures and selfies that specifically place you in a clear location (outside a famous restaurant in Monaco or arriving at a well-known hotel in LA, for example) is obviously just as risky. And it should go without saying of course that your charges should never, ever be photographed or filmed for social sharing.
Our advice is to give your social media accounts and your habits a good spring clean. Check whether your accounts are public or private (we strongly recommend the latter), clean up your lists of friends and followers, and look at your settings to be sure that you’re not handing out real-time locations every time you update. Better still, take a step away from the social media machine and ENJOY the holidays…