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Comment by dancek | Hacker News Reader

Screen scraping photos of my kids from a kindergarten website. Recognizing good photos that feature my kids and deleting everything else is manual, though.

Alerts to my phone if the fridge or freezer temperature exceeds a limit or the humidity under my dishwasher starts rising.

Granted, neither are fully automatic and require manual intervention.

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I wouldn’t be that pleased with a childcare facility taking photos of my kid then putting them on the internet. I suspect I’m in a small minority though.

It could also be scraped behind a login. Plenty of headless web browsers now that can be scripted to login and then start scraping.

It's behind a login and they've asked for parents' consent for each child separately. Everyone with access has agreed not to share any of the photos.

I actually haven't shared my scraper script just because I think someone would then share the pictures (perhaps accidentally).

EDIT: I'll just add that there are no public photos of my kids and I ask anyone who takes photos not to share them outside family. So I do agree with your point.

That’s less alarming than I’d interpreted, and I didn’t mention in the first post - your script is a good idea.

Why?

Why do I want to keep kindergarten photos of my kids, or why don't I want to manually save them one by one from the website?

Why do you ask?

The question was directed at lostlogin, not you. I’m interested to know why people object to have their kids pictures on the sites of the daycare providers.

Kids don't need to be exposed on the internet until they are able to decide themselves if they are okay with it. When that is is up to the parent. I always ask my 8-year old even before I share photos with her grandparents.

"I don't know why you're so upset, sweetie. You said it was okay when you were 8."

It’s more that I don’t know the reason it’s being taken. We have had photos taken by tourists that have sidled up and taken photos and had companies take photos then ask for permission for use in promotion. We felt pressure to accept these after the event, though didn’t.

And then there is privacy.

Did you build the IoT devices yourself or used an off the shelf solution?

I'm using a ready-made solution from http://wirelesstag.net . While I think I could build suitable hardware myself, I wouldn't have the skills to make them run on a battery for two years.

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