GRAND TRAVERSE COUNTY — With school officially starting in Northern Michigan, parents may feel the need to post first day of school pictures, with signs sharing all sorts of information, but officers say that is a bad idea.
Signs depicting information like a students age, teacher, and graduation year are sharing too much information.
Deputy Jessica Core, the School Resource Officer for Garfield Township Schools, tells us “We live in a year where scamming is a huge issue. And so you don’t want to provide too much information about your child on the internet so that scammers can see that and then use that information to try to get money out of you”
Deputy Jason Roelofs, SRO for Kingsley Schools adds that it doesn’t take much now a days to find out information about a person, saying there are entire social media channels dedicated to doing just that.
Deputy Roelofs says “And this guy takes the tiniest little clues and locates them around the world….these are people that aren’t even providing, you know, that much information, but so, you know, there are bad people in this world. And why give them information for them to do something with, you know, so that’s my thing is, is limit what you’re presenting to the world”
If you decide to do a first day of school sign, just include a first name of your child, their grade, and the date.
Deputy Core tells us “when you start getting into the more complex signs like the one that you had shown where it’s the child’s full name, it’s the teacher that they’re going to be with.It’s the school. It is class of, you know, 2038 or whatever it may be. And then some signs have on this day I am this tall. I weighed this much. You have no idea like what people are using that information for.”
Deputy Core adds that the information could be used in scams and swatting calls.
It is not just parents who need to watch what they put on line, students are told to be wary too.
Deputy Roelofs says to keep friend groups on social media close, adding “know who your friends are. You know and know who you’re sharing stuff with. That’s the first thing if you’re just sharing stuff with random people. I mean, yeah, that’s a big concern, a big red flag”