Data, photography and consent

What you carry about people on your phone, and what you may publish about them.

Do not keep beneficiary name lists or photographs on your personal phone after the task ends
Do not send beneficiary data into a WhatsApp group — a group is read by people you do not know and cannot be deleted from their devices
Share a file only with whoever needs it for their work, through the association’s channel
Do not use a person’s name or image on your personal account
Report immediately if you lose your phone or notebook, or a file leaks

Consent to photography is not a smile at the camera. Real consent means the person knows where the image will appear and why, knows that refusing will not affect their assistance in any way, and can withdraw it later. For children: the guardian’s consent and the child’s own, both together rather than either one.

Images that are not published, whatever the consent

A child’s face in a safeguarding or violence context, a survivor of assault, a person in a moment of collapse, undress or injury, or anything that reveals where an at-risk family lives. Consent does not cancel the harm that may reach the subject after publication, and they cannot foresee it the way you can.

Field scenario

An activity has ended and your supervisor asks you to send the attendance list of children’s names quickly. The fastest route available is to photograph it and post it in the team’s WhatsApp group. What do you do?