While a great way to share pictures of your newborn with family and friends, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have a number of policies which might influence your decision to post photos online.
1. Facebook
While you own the content that you post on Facebook and can restrict how it is shared via your privacy settings, “subject to your privacy settings" you are giving Facebook “non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.”
However, even if you delete content from your page, it doesn’t mean it is completely gone. According to Facebook’s Terms of Service, content that you delete can “persist in backup copies for a reasonable period of time (but will not be available to others).”
Finally, “when you publish content or information using the Public setting, it means that you are allowing everyone, including people off of Facebook, to access and use that information, and to associate it with you.”
2. Twitter
Twitter is a little different to Facebook as it states that on its Terms of Services page: “By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant [Twitter] a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed).”
This means that your tweets are available to the rest of the world and that you are allowing Twitter “to make Content submitted to or through the Services available to other companies, organizations or individuals who partner with Twitter for the syndication, broadcast, distribution or publication of such Content on other media and services, subject to our terms and conditions for such Content use.”
They do state: “What’s yours is yours – you own your Content (and your photos are part of that Content).” However, at the end they declare: “Additional uses by Twitter, or other companies, organizations or individuals who partner with Twitter, may be made with no compensation paid to you with respect to the Content that you submit, post, transmit or otherwise make available through the Services.”
3. Instagram
While Instagram doesn’t state that they own your content, they do declare that by posting pictures on the site you “grant to Instagram a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to use the Content that you post on or through the Service, subject to the Service's Privacy Policy.”
At the end of their Terms of Services, they write: “You agree to pay for all royalties, fees, and any other monies owed by reason of Content you post on or through the Service.”
Information correct as at 10th June 2015. The terms and conditions of each site are always being updated so do make sure you check their policies before posting photos.
