I’m 14, and I quit social media after discovering what was posted about me
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
I'm hopeful that in the next several years there is a pushback against social media and the idea that for an experience to be valid, it must be shared. There's something to be said for having an album of photos that you pull out a couple of times a year to show a select group of others. It makes the experience much more valuable than blasting out content for everyone to see.
Makes me think that Gen Z is much wiser than the Millennials. People coming of age today are much more cautious than those who did 5-10 years ago (lots of drunken party photos on Facebook, etc). They understand the consequences of having information in the world that never goes away.
My perhaps unreasonable hope for a Facebook killer is just a paid personal archive of your own photos, writings, etc. with the assumption of privacy by default.
You can also create groups and post photos/videos to that for sharing with family.
Only issue I've run into is the Amazon Photos app on Android doesn't always back up photos as timely as I'd like, and deleting photos on my phone (wanting them to stay in the cloud) results in some odd behavior with images not loading, even though pulling up a computer they're still there.
I also have a quite large video that it keeps getting stuck on with the upload, which might be part of the issue.
https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Photos/b?ie=UTF8&node=13234696...
It then does nice 'reminders' of your images and videos from years back.
This plus google docs if you want to save private writings has you pretty much covered.
I am very happy to be off social media now - my vague replacement is sharing things to Whatsapp with selected friends and family.
As I discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19444392
Really, the only reason Google’s collection of online services (Google One, basically,though the individual services mostly are older than that bundling) falls down here is that several of them use unguessable URLs and URL sharing as the private sharing mechanism (at least for read only sharing), instead of revocable access delegation.
Also, the assumption of privacy is nice, but how private is it actually? For example, you'd have to break into my house and steal my photo album to see pictures of me as a baby.
Not trying to be contrary, I guess I just don't resonate with social media that much. A private personal archive of my data would be one that I control on my own devices. I treat posting to the cloud, in whatever form, as making it public despite whatever assurances they have about privacy, unless it's something like my taxes or banking information where there are strict laws involved.
We went from that to the complete opposite.
It may be a fabricated memory, but I remember always being aware of the lack of privacy in those services. And never using your last name or sharing your location.
(This is still true, in fact.)
A lot of messages did.
While I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment, and mostly agree with the idea, a part of me sees that only as a change in scale. As someone that doesn't really partake in social media sharing (I use FB for event notification) or take many pictures, I see parallels between sharing the album and posting online. I've had plenty of embarrassing childhood photos shown. Generally the only difference is time from the event.
I mean, it's not like a couple hundred years ago we even had the option to do this (other than the obscenely rich getting portraits painted).
I note all this because I find often when it appears it's just scale that makes a difference, that's just hiding the real things that are causing concern (or perhaps we should also be concerned to some degree about the small scale as well). So in this case, is sharing an album really all that much better? If so, is it because of temporal distance to the events, reduced group size per sharing instance (the overall size might be the same, over time), or sharing with people that aren't in some tighter group (or some combination thereof)?
It's been a challenge ensuring friends and family don't post stuff about our daughter, but reading this reinforces that we're making the right choice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Online_Privacy_Pr...
For me, old enough is "when you can demonstrate meaningful understanding of the negatives of the platform". "I want to because my friends use it" isn't enough. "I want to but I'd only use [Snapchat-style ephemeral data] so people can't make fun of me with it" is much closer, as is "I want to because I want to talk to my friends but I wouldn't connect with people who aren't my friends".
So it's not a hard number, but my guess is that it's going to be about 13, like others have said.
We deliberately didn't tell anyone when my wife went into labour, as she didn't want anyone else there.
It's not that I don't think children are adorable. I'm talking about parents who have a baby and then spend every day posting photos about every event in the child's life. I know 3 people in my relatively small circle who have been posting on behalf of their children for years.
Maybe I'm a freak, but I think there's something seriously messed up with having one's life broadcasted to strangers. I'm not saying that it's bad to include updates about/with one's children occasionally in social media posts, but I think it's wrong to make a child's entire life an open book without their consent.
Worst of all, it's not really about the child. I mean, it kind of is, but it's mostly for the parents to feel good.
Of course their participation is much different than what you're thinking of, but those unknown databases should be part of the calculation.
The problem starts for me with the fact that most of the "friends" people have on sites like Facebook are not actual friends, but acquaintances they might not have seen or talked to again for years. Most of the my "friends" on Facebook have hundreds of "friends", sometimes thousands. For all intents and purposes, most of those people are strangers.
It feels like it massively cheapens actual friendships.
"Followers" isn't much better. Different word, similar implications.
Obviously, there are still "leaks", but clearly discussing it with people and explaining why usually is enough. Although we get some strange looks, I explain what I personally can do with just a small dataset, and then people respect it.
I think it's probably the single largest threat to our society, because it's essentially normalizing zero-privacy. I personally think it should be a choice that can be made at 14 or something. I'm a libertarian, but I often think laws to protect children are relatively good. As such, I think a law protecting a child's privacy is probably something we as a society should consider. Implementation would be quite difficult, however.
The problem has more to do with the future adult. My work related to ML has me horrified to think of the future. With enough data about a child (and enough of a training dataset), it should be possible to predict outcomes (political leaning, wealth, death, etc.)
My sister had a baby last year, and she's been posting and sharing photos and videos non-stop.
Recently she asked me if I knew if hackers could break into baby monitor because she was worried some hacker may spy on her sleeping baby... I had a good laugh first, then I felt sad for her.
It's an issue of consent. She's voluntarily sharing specific selected photos & videos with her social peers, a hacked baby monitor would be a violation. The glib dismissal here helps nobody.
Her baby hasn't given consent. Believe you me, there's loads of 'Invasion of Privacy' lawsuits from kids to their parents coming down the pipe over the next decade.
The distinction between sharing specific photos and hacked baby monitor, as pointed out by ianlevesque, is still important and it's wrong to casually dismiss it.
I think it's the same for these kids who have been posted on social media by their parents. Kids get their lives ruined by this type of stuff. The internet has a long memory, and these children are in no way capable of consenting. Yeah it's not Cash Me Outside girl bad but you're still potentially putting still maturing children on display to be potentially mocked by random internet mobs. Forever.
and what did you tell her?
"Baby" gadgets and toys are the most vulnerable. I liked the story where a teddy bear that allowed parents to leave messages was hosting recordings and replies on a public fileserver. You have to get more imaginative to think about who would take advantage of that and why, but its a valid enough answer, especially for a simply "spying" concern.
So, of course I helped them to setup the IP camera in such way that they could use it securely. (VPN, strong encryption on their WiFi, etc)
And of course I also explained them that they should be careful with whom they share the photos.
I had never really considered it to be an issue (I have a private account, pictures only get shared with friends family), but thinking more on it- she really should be asked to consent to share it, even if my account is locked down. I've been telling her (for as long as it's relevant) that anything on the internet stays there forever, and we've had talks about privacy when they want to install some cheap knock-off F2P mobile game that wants access to your entire phone, but this is another aspect I need to consider.
Now you've made me wonder if "can I take a photo" carries an implicit "and share them around the world" with it. In hindsight as someone constantly being forced into photos it seems to.
I'm glad that you are thinking starting from your daughter, and I hope that the pattern continues.
While you can't prevent everything, I've only asked people to take pics down a couple of times and they've been understanding.
(I do wonder how facial recognition will deal with ex post facto attribution of photos of children, given how our faces change as we age. Up to about age 4 my daughter was nearly indistinguishable from one of her cousins in photos-- a testament to the power of my wife's family's genetics, I guess...)
"When Kids Realize Their Whole Life Is Already Online" https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/02/when-...
"My daughter asked me to stop writing about motherhood. Here’s why I can’t do that." https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2019/01/03/my-daugh...
This part got me. To me that article definitely makes it sound like she's a writer first, and mother second. I just hope her child grows up to be a better person than that, or I hope I'm misunderstanding that article.
"I can't stop writing about you mom. Your attempt to 'amputate parts of my experience' feels abusive to our relationship."
Can those kids contact website support to have it all removed, or relatives accounts suspended? If a stranger posted about your kid, the consequences would be something else and of different magnitude.
I can't really comprehend the thinking here of the family members who did this. They talk about her but not to her?
That's the opposite of "social" behavior. That's treating her like an object, not a person.
Lots of weird things happen in the privacy of home. Children are especially vulnerable to having a fast one pulled on them.
So I don't see any reason to question the story at this time, though I'm also not up for trying to actually verify the veracity so as to win some internet argument.
As such I don't think I have seen either of my family members Facebooks, except if I accidentally glance in the direction of their phones.
Then again, I think I’m a more permissive parent than most and I don’t really shelter her from anything.
> Sonia Bokhari is an 8th grader and a persuasive and narrative writer. She is also the leader of her middle school’s Gay-Straight Alliance and a member of the school’s Environmental Club.
She might not be the average 14yo :)
Since this is the 21st century and everyone's on a hair trigger for reasons to be offended, everyone in magazines like that is edited, so there's nothing particular about this author getting edited. Magazines have editors for a reason. Nobody produces the best prose on their own without any editing.
The only thing in the article that really struck me as strained was the "We are also the next generation of engineers and innovators," bit. Wouldn't be surprised that was a whole-cloth editorial insertion.
People have been saying this to kids non-stop, so it's not a stretch to think that they would parrot it as well. I think both explanations are plausible.
"How did you feel? Did you feel betrayed?" "Yeah I guess. It's embarrassing."
=> "I felt utterly embarrassed, and deeply betrayed."
Also this...
> I feel like I’m being spared from what could potentially be dangerous for me at such a young age.
... is definitely written by an adult. For one thing, 14 year olds don't think they are young.
Having been 14 relatively recently, yes, they do, at least in this sort of context.
ITT: Everyone forgets about the blogging sites that were popular when they were 13 and 14.
2002 had lots of articulate 14 year olds, what happened with your experience?
Somehow, perhaps because of the pervasiveness of social media, the sense of self has expanded quite a great deal.
In a family, and later in public life, we don't have the right to control how we are perceived in the public. (I know some countries in the EU have differing views on that, but I disagree with them as well).
Just as the daughter has the right to not share herself or her life on social media, I don't believe she has the right to demand approval of her mother's or sister's posts.
I would argue that the mother and the sister have an equal right to share their lives as they wish, that includes things that were given or said to them by the daughter that is now aghast that these items were shared further.
Freedoms are always a balancing act. Every time we expand our personal sphere of control, we are impinging on the sphere of control of someone else.
I mean, I get the sentiment, and I get that a 13/14 year old would be embarrassed by these types of things, but that is unfortunately what life is like. We get to control the things we say and do, but we don't get to control what others do with it.
A legal right? Absolutely not. A moral right? Absolutely.
Knowingly disclosing information about someone that that person has expressly confirmed they would like to remain private is certainly not a friendly act. When the parties involved are in a close relationship, this can feel like (and in my view is) a serious betrayal. Such a betrayal can permanently damage that relationship.
The daughter's feelings in this situation are entirely valid, and she is entirely within her moral rights to demand her mother not violate her privacy.
> A legal right? Absolutely not. A moral right? Absolutely.
Depends on your jurisdiction. In some regions, the subject of the photo is the legal owner, and absolutely has the right to control distribution.
The demand also damages the relationship.
On the far left side of the power law curve of that, we have:
“Online and Making Thousands, at Age 4: Meet the Kidfluencers“
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/01/business/media/social-med...
It's so funny how the media pushes neverending anti-social media stories and yet exploits children themselves for money.
Is it okay when the elites and the news industry does it but not when ordinary people do it?
Of course it was a bit extreme, but when I read that I'm afraid it might happens.
To my big shame I'm also quoting my kids sometimes on FB. But there are no picture of them online.
And I use FB with a pseudo and quote the with aliases only family know, so I guess it's not as bad.
I don't mind occasional non-embarrassing non-inappropriate pictures and stories, but FFS, please don't live stream their entire life, it just seems so disrespectful to the kid.
It's also uninteresting to everyone else but you and perhaps the grandparents to boot.
As much as this concerns the child's social media life, it's also a matter of the parent's experience. Parents post this stuff to share, and commiserate, and participate with other parents in the experience of parenthood. I find it difficult to accept that this girl will grow up and privately horde all of her children's images and information until they give consent to release it. Teenager tend to struggle with the fact that the people around them have lives as well.
All that said, I operate my social media very differently than this girls parent's seem to. I prune and keep friends lists very inner circle, I never post anything publicly, and I often show my children the pictures that I'm posting and get them involved in the process. they won't be surprised about social media when they become teenagers.
I think the next generation of people are just going to need to develop a thicker digital skin.
We take a lot of pictures and videos of our kids, but we don't share almost all of it. I keep everything backed up safe with the intention of handing it all over to the kids once they're old enough. They're the subjects of the pictures, they're the owners.
Maybe this is an opportunity for some social media company to get ahead of this and use facial recognition to tag people across ages. If the user decides that they don't want their image to appear on someone else's account, they can go through the images granularly and take them down.
I think what I'm getting at is that this is _new_. It's as new as is the ability of a 14 year old to express their frustration with something and have an audience of millions. I don't think the solution here is to tell parents that it's inappropriate to post about their children online. I think the real solution has more to do with finding a comfortable balance and set of controls so that everyone's interests can be accounted for.
p.s. I shuddered while typing "14 year old to express their frustration with something and have an audience of millions". The next 50 years are going to contain some _hard_ times.
I have considered resurrecting my social media presence lately. I live a long ways away from my parents. I think it is kind-of nice to allow my parents to form a para-social bond with my online presence. Just so they can see how I am doing.
However, I keep coming back to the same mantra about social media: There is no wisdom here. I love learning, reading, experimenting with new hobbies. I am lifelong learner. Social media does not enhance that.
I tend to be a spitfire, and chewing out old people on facebook is NOT a good look. I do not want my past social media posts to come back to haunt me.
Also, I get a lot of anxiety when I am on social media. Old friends, old lovers, all of these messy complicated situations and people I have moved away from. Dragging all of that back up... no thanks.
When this girl grows up, she'll understand she was being immature and there's nothing embarrassing about your parents posting moments about you that made them proud. Her parents seem awesome that they're respecting her wishes now.
As I write this, I'm reminded of a Louis CK bit when he describes your thought process when you see a woman scolding her kid in public. When you're not a parent (which seems like most commenters here), you're thinking OMG what a terrible parent. When you're a parent, you're thinking what must that child have done to that poor woman.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc are too big and too open for kids (heck, I am a father of two and I don't feel comfortable on the platforms because they are too public).
Also, I have no desire to see my children use traditional social media, they are toxic and are breeding grounds for bullying.
I'm about 10 years older than the author, and we were aware. The Cambridge Analytica scandal is just the straw that broke the Camel's back. That was Facebook's MO all the way back circa 2010. It was just that most of us teenagers at the time simply didn't care. The adults warned us the same way they warn teens today but for the most part they didn't care about the data mining back then either.
This isn't child abuse by any means but it's just incredibly dumb on the parts of the adults around them. By writing/posting about kids you make them public figures and open them up to all the abuse anyone on the internet wants to heap on them. And this is all happening at a time when they are going through painfully awkward transitions and just starting to discover who they are and want to be.
There are absolutely going to be lawsuits about this sooner than you'd think.
One of the big challenges has been other people (family members, etc.) who want to take pictures of our kids or record some funny quote and post it on THEIR profiles. We as the parents don't always have control over that (and we've had to request more than once that somebody take something down they posted). It's awkward all around, and I'm not sure what the solution is other than developing manners as a society (just like people have been trained to write SPOILER ALERT before they blab about a movie in comments or whatever).
This sort of idea dovetails nicely with the Secure Scuttlebutt concept that the social network graph mirrors the physical network: you swap the latest posts with others as you find yourself on the same local network.
Perhaps someday we will live in a more sophisticated world that relies less on centralized cloud providers and everyone runs a home server. Stories of youth pushing back against social media are certainly a step in the right direction.
1. Connects to the internet
2. uPnPs silently port 80 to itself
3. Registers a name with a dynamic DNS service (remember those?)
4. Has ~4GB local storage
5. Runs a 'newsfeed' type web portal or API.
6. Has a Phone app for easy sharing/creation of content.
Make this 100% turnkey for non-technical people and you MAY have a chance at getting people to stop storing personal stuff 'in the cloud'. I don't hold out much hope though.
Besides the fact that in the post-Let’s Encrypt world we should start expecting port 443 by default for any web service, for many ISPs running a publicly accessible server violates the terms of service unless your contract with the ISP is their business tier.
To make things worse, a lot of people are issued a router by their ISP where uPnP is disabled, and they do not have access to its firmware to change this or other settings.
> Despite everything that had happened with my mom and sister, I had made one of the most common mistakes; all of my social media accounts were public.
I've taken the opposite stance and preferred public accounts: that way I don't post anything I'm not comfortable with being seen by the world. IMHO the false sense of privacy setting would end up making me providing a lot more data to networks.
Personally, I don't feel comfortable with the idea of my photos being taken out of context and used in a way that I wouldn't agree with. Oddly enough, most of my friends don't see this as an issue.
"Can a child freely give consent to be photographed, especially in vulnerable positions including nudity, when the photographer is a parent? Do these photographs unintentionally put children at greater risk given the reality of pedophilia in society? Do they unintentionally encourage a sexualized view of childhood? Does such work on any level exploit these actual children?"
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=mqr;c=mqr;...
It seems like fear is her only justification, which to me if anything, is the worse reason to do anything. Being aware of the risk and mitigating it when necessary is the right way to do it, instead of simply letting fear control us. The strange thing is that she seems to be aware of that risk and did use methods to mitigate it.
Her lack of social media doesn't seems to affect her though, so I guess it's alright in her case. I know personally though that my group of friend and I had ton of trouble to include people without social media in any event organization, and the increased friction slowly pushed many of the ones without it away (while the solution, which did work for some, was simply a fully anonymous account, though I think Facebook now ban theses accounts).
this is really challenging, I do not not have social media [1] and have not since 2007/8 ish and yet I know that people still post things about me and sometimes forward me an email of a picture posted at an event, dinner, gathering. I really do not know the answer here, I look like the bad guy if I inform others I do not want myself on there so I lose and know no way around it. More and more I feel the only privacy that exists is between my ears.
[0] https://www.theonion.com/6-year-old-explains-how-messed-up-i...
[1] other than HN I suppose
It brings up the question of how old they need to be (my kid was about 3-4 when she started telling us to put up her photos). But I guess we can always remove it later, and just don't put anything embarrassing up there.
How can a 3-4 year old give meaningful consent to having her biometrics irrevocably recorded by one of the world's most aggressive and pernicious surveillance corporations? How fully did your kids understand all the implications of posting photos on social media before you agreed to do it?
> But I guess we can always remove it later
No. You can't. Maybe you can ask FB to stop showing the photo to other people, and maybe they'll comply, but FB will still retain it and any data derived from it (e.g., facial biometric data). Other people could have saved that photo and could re-post it at any time. Or FB could have a bug and that photo could resurface.
Once something is published on the www, there are no backsies. This is something every parent these days needs to impress upon their children. I'm honestly shocked that you, fellow HN poster, need to learn this lesson, too.
Well, that's because you're 13, the age when kids turn blase and embarrassed about being kids, and of the childish things they used to like.
It's not like her mother did anything specially wrong, e.g. posting the letter to the tooth fairy, and so on.
It's only embarrassing to her because she's 13. When she's older, she will cringe that she used to be embarrassed about such a thing.
Children do not and cannot have this luxury. They should not be held responsible for their choices and actions in the way that adults are, and a part of this is ensuring that their life is not documented with the level of permanency that is inherent in the internet.
If the parent's Facebook is private, that'll probably be the end of that.
Since I'm perfectly willing to do this for my child once they're old enough to form opinions about their own privacy, I don't see the problem with sharing photos of them to my private network while they aren't.
"The horses escaped. Quick, close the barn door!"
It's not like all feelings are a big deal. People also get "feelings" about stupid stuff. Teenagers doubly so.
It annoyed me when I was a kid that my parents were just babbling about everything I did to family, and the internet didn't exist back then. The thought of what they'd have done if I was a teenager today... ugh.
Ill never advocate for parents to never do ANYTHING that makes their kids uncomfortable...that's just part of growing up. But putting it all on the internet for their 750 facebook "friends"...no just no.
Wait, seriously? I need to move to France ASAP. I hate the fact I can't participate in any kind of event without assholes taking a ton of pictures and posting online.
Not sure if it's really "not wrong". There is a growing notion in Western society that kids are actually people and have rights, and not just their parents' trinkets. Would you like someone to share your correspondence on social media, even if it's misaddressed? Or post your naked pictures without your consent (which kids can't give yet)? I suspect you'd mind very much, and no amount of rhetoric like "you're only upset because you're not enlightened enough" will change your mind. Why is it OK then when parents do that?
Second, which I'd argue is in fact more important, do you realize how damaging it can be at age 14 to experience this sort of betrayal of trust and elimination of privacy? It's as if the bully in your class got to read your diary aloud - times 100x. The content doesn't really matter, the transgression of boundaries does. And of course you might laugh about it once you gain the distance from your past self and its worries and pains, but it doesn't make the event any less exposing and possibly traumatizing. Adolescence is a brittle time in the development of a personality, and the kind of experiences one has aren't any less impactful because they're "just kids".
This is essentially what posting things to a public facebook profile is, and while I find it understandable that parents would do it without thinking, I find it horrifying that someone would defend it as "not wrong" with the benefit of hindsight.
Is this her idea or the idea of her mother who probably is friends with someone working at fastcompany?
I'd be interested to find out how a "random" 8th grader got to write an article for fastcompany and if she or her family has any ties with anyone at fastcompany or even Mehta, the editor.
Also, couldn't this also be viewed as fastcompany exploiting an 8th grader for money and agenda? And is this girl's parents any better than the social media parents?
The internal contradictions and hypocrisy in this article is quite something to behold.