You oughta be in pictures. Your kids? Maybe not so much.

I don’t have much to do with Facebook, and nothing to do with Insta.

On FB, I’m basically there to see what’s up with my friends’ kids, grandkids, and pets. Beck is walking! Pete was a dragon for Halloween! Rufus (who’s a dog) was a lion!

I’m always happy to see these pictures and feel I’m keeping up with the kiddos and doggos I may only see in person once or twice a year, if that.

Smartphones, of course, turn everyone into a photographer documenting their kids’ and pets’ daily existence. And unlike in the olden days, when you had to develop pictures by dropping roles of film off at the drugstore, or – if you were the adventurous techie-type – use nasty smelling chemical rollers to develop your own Polaroids, picture-taking today is free. Thus there are a lot more pictures of kids out taken. And, what with the good old Internet, no barrier to sharing those pictures with the world.

In a 2016 study, parents shared an average of 116 photos of their kids, and the Child Rescue Coalition, a Florida-based nonprofit dedicated to shielding children from predators, estimates that 90% of children have photos on social media by the age of 2. (Quartz.com)

Now, the first part of that paragraph sounds a tad excessive but fine. As in I’m fine with seeing 116 photos of someone’s kids and grandkids. That’s just a bit over 2 per week. Who doesn’t like to see cute kids so that they can ooh-and-aah  to the parents and grandparents?

But the mention of predators and rescue in the second part? That’s pretty yucky and unsettling. Especially when you consider that all those parents and grandparents:

…may also be sharing with strangers. And some of those strangers, it turns out, use those photos to create online fantasy worlds.

It’s called digital kidnapping. Instagram users “roleplay” with these photos, using hashtags like #AdoptionRP, #KidRP, #BabyRP and #OrphanRP to post children’s pictures “up for grabs,” i.e., to be used to establish the identity and backstory of their “character.” For instance, in a photo that shows a full baby diaper, the user implores someone to adopt “Baby Tye,” who was “put into a big basket with his teddy, some milk and himself on the streets.”

A few years back, there was a lot of publicity around those lifelike baby dolls that women were buying and treating as if they were real children. They were buying real baby clothing for them – and baby “stuff” designed for real babies: cribs, carseats, carriers, etc. – and taking them out in public for people to ooh and aah over. Until, I guess, they realized that there was something wrong with the non-baby baby. (I seem to recall that, in one case, someone broke the window in a car on a hot day to rescue a baby that turned out to be nothing but a doll.)

Anyway, I thought that fake-baby scene was plenty weird, creepy and pathetic.

I find this roleplay scene equally weird, creepy and pathetic, but with the ante ante’d way up, given that they’re borrowing someone else’s kids to fill in their plotlines. Guess it’s not enough to have a weird, creepy and pathetic digital avatar that looks line an anime character. Now you need to have a real fake thing.

Some “people roleplay as the child,” and hangout out playing with their little roleplay friends. (Don’t they have their own friends to play with. Sad!)

In “family” roleplay accounts, multiple people interact with each other, pretending to be couples, siblings, or parents to children.

Guess I’m just too inhibited to want join a fake online family. I mean, how embarrassing. Or maybe, even without kids of my own, I have enough real people in my life that I don’t really need to make family up.

And didn’t roleplay used to be something that actual people did with other actual people whom they knew and maybe even loved – or at least liked well enough to hang around with. I googled “is roleplay healthy” and the answer is that, even if it sounds a bit kinky, it is in fact healthy. But virtual roleplay? I dunno…And when it comes to kidnapping the image of someone else’s kid and using it on the down-low. Whoa, baby.

The good news is that the roleplayers tend to go for professional photos, not for your crappy iPhone snaps.

Still, it’s a bit frightening. I can’t imagine how awful it would be for a parent or grandparent to find out that their little guys (or even your pets) are being used in someone’s oddball roleplay game. Let alone by some complete and utter perv – and you’ve got to believe there are plenty of them out there in virtual land.

There is just so much creepy downside to the Internet, is there not??