Calm beats alarm
Children are often the softest target around a wealthy family, but protecting them online is mostly a matter of quiet, consistent habits rather than fear. The goal is to reduce what is publicly knowable about them — where they are, where they study, how to reach them — while letting them have a normal childhood. This is general information, not legal advice, and not a substitute for retained counsel or advice tailored to your family. It fits within the wider digital executive protection program, because attackers reach a principal through the family as readily as through the principal.
The privacy baseline
- Locked-down accounts.Set children's social and gaming accounts to private, limit who can contact them, and use platform parental controls and screen-time tools appropriate to their age.
- No location or school leakage. Keep the school, sports schedule, home, and regular haunts out of bios and posts, and disable location tagging. Patterns are as revealing as any single detail.
- Device hygiene. Keep devices updated, use strong passcodes, and review the apps and permissions that can see contacts, camera, and location.
- Off the data brokers.Children appear in people-search listings through family records; include them in the household's broker opt-out and re-listing monitoring covered in doxxing defense.
Use the rights the law gives you
The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act gives parents real leverage: services directed at children under 13 must obtain verifiable parental consent before collecting personal information, and the FTC explains how parents can review what has been collected and request its deletion. CISA's personal-security guidance adds the broader habits — minimizing what the family shares and keeping location data private — that protect children alongside adults.
If something goes wrong
Should an explicit image of a minor surface or be threatened, move quickly and through the right channel rather than confronting the offender. NCMEC's Take It Down service helps remove such images of minors and works from a hash generated on the device, so the image itself is never uploaded. Preserve evidence, bring in counsel, and report to law enforcement. The instinct to handle it privately and immediately is understandable, but the structured route is the one that actually gets the material down and protects any later case.
A steady hand
Most of this is preventive, and most of it is quiet. Engagements here usually begin with a calm review of what is already public about the children and a short plan to bring it down — done with discretion, and without turning the household into a place of constant worry.
Sources
- National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), Take It Down. https://takeitdown.ncmec.org/
- Federal Trade Commission, Protecting Your Child's Privacy Online. https://consumer.ftc.gov/articles/protecting-your-childs-privacy-online
- Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Personal Security Considerations Action Guide. https://www.cisa.gov/resources-tools/resources/personal-security-considerations-action-guide
