A donor wrote to us last month, quite reasonably, to say that our website was full of pictures of empty classrooms and stacks of books, and that other organisations she supported showed her the children she was helping. She wanted to know whether we were hiding something.
We are not. We are declining to publish something, which is different, and we should explain it properly.
Every photograph of an identifiable child that appears anywhere public — this site, Instagram, an annual report, a donor deck — requires a signed consent form from a parent or guardian before it is taken, not after. The form is in Telugu. It names the specific uses consented to: website, social media, print, press. It carries an expiry date. And it can be withdrawn at any time, by a phone call, with no reason given and no argument from us.
Under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023, processing a child's personal data requires verifiable parental consent, and behavioural tracking and targeted advertising directed at children are prohibited outright. But the law is the floor, not the reason. The reason is that a photograph of a nine-year-old, captioned to explain how poor her family is, will outlive our campaign by twenty years and will be findable by her classmates, her future employer and anyone else who cares to look. She cannot consent to that. Her mother, signing a form in a school verandah while an outsider with a camera waits, is not in a strong position to refuse.
The cost of this is real. Roughly half our media library is flagged as containing minors, and a good part of that sits unpublished because consent is pending, expired or was withdrawn. Our fundraising material is measurably less affecting than it could be. We have lost at least one corporate proposal over it.
We think that is the correct trade. If you want to see the work, look at the school register, the distribution records, the audited accounts and the reading assessment data. Those are all public, all specific, and none of them requires a child to give up her privacy to prove that we did something.
