Pinwheel Ball spotlights risks of sharing children’s photos online

The annual Pinwheel Ball at the Oncenter on April 17 turned a fundraiser into a digital-safety warning for Onondaga County families: the photos people post of children can be copied, shared, or manipulated long after they are uploaded.

McMahon Ryan Child Advocacy Center used the event to spotlight a problem that now sits alongside abuse prevention and intervention work. Advocates said the risk has grown as social media and artificial intelligence make it easier to alter ordinary family images once they are online. That shift, they said, has changed child safety from a question of physical protection alone into a broader issue of privacy, school education, and online responsibility.

The concern is not abstract. Research cited in the discussion shows nearly half of parents share photos of their children online, and by age 5 a child may already have close to 1,000 images of themselves on the internet. That kind of footprint, advocates said, makes careful posting more important than ever.

McMahon Ryan executive director Erin Bates, Lauryn Rufo, and chief assistant district attorney Jarrett Woodfork all pushed the same basic message: use privacy settings, limit who can see posts, and be more selective about what gets shared in the first place. They stressed that there is no perfect guarantee an image will not be saved or misused, so the best protection is to reduce access before a photo is posted.

The advice matters for families across Onondaga County, where the Pinwheel Ball brings together community leaders, advocates, and parents to support child-abuse prevention services. The evening underscored how that mission now extends into the digital spaces where children’s lives are increasingly documented.

Advocates also pointed to schools as a place to teach children about digital responsibility and the consequences of online sharing. In classrooms and at home, they said, children need to learn that images can travel quickly, be copied without permission, and resurface in ways families never intended.

For McMahon Ryan and its partners, the lesson from the Pinwheel Ball was clear: child protection in Onondaga County now includes helping parents think as carefully about a photo post as they do about any other decision affecting a child’s safety.