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Comment by low_tech_love | Hacker News Reader

I live in Sweden and it’s forbidden for me (or them) to take pictures of my kid at school, ever. I have all these great pictures of me and my friends in the 80s doing theater plays and christmas singing and whatnot from when I was a kid. My children will get none of that. Actually, they do send me pictures sometimes: of headless bodies, hands or arms in weird angles apparently doing something fun (I can’t really tell). Are people simply too lazy to deal with the responsibility of living in human society?

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Our modern societies have decided that the most important thing when dealing with any problem (real or perceived) is assigning blame. If you can't assign blame to the actual perpetrator, then you assign it to whoever "allowed" them to do whatever bad thing they did. And now it became a better-safe-than-sorry game, where absolutely ludicrous decisions - some of which actually hurt the very people we're supposedly trying to protect - are made solely to minimize one's chance of getting blamed and held liable.

What do you think the kings and queens of old did other than assigning blame when a problem came up? Have you not read about the hemming and hawing of royal advisors, trying to avoid stepping into a problem and at best losing their position and at worse being executed?

Enough with characterizing millenia-long human behavior as "our modern societies"!

It may be millennia-long, but as many people in this discussion have remarked, we certainly didn't have this degree of paranoia 40 years ago - and many countries don't have it today.

>What do you think the kings and queens of old did other than assigning blame when a problem came up?

When rare unforeseeable stuff happened they chalked up to god.

Violence was reserved for the people who genuinely screwed up.

I'm not sure that the wives of Henry VIII would really agree with this. Nor, for that matter, Thomas More.

>I'm not sure that the wives of Henry VIII would really agree with this

And neither would Vicky Weaver.

Henry VIII's wives and Thomas more got murdered for political reasons. We still do that shit today, but in less quantity. We prefer to just ruin people's careers which is basically just a modern equivalent of exile.

What happened to the advisors and commanders of the Spanish Armada who's mistakes lost them a fleet? Pretty much nothing because everyone was like "welp, can't predict the weather".

That is exactly the point: avoid blame in the absolute rare case where something could potentially happen. I won’t rant about Sweden (I could, believe me) but it’s the kind of place where (1) nothing will ever really happen, (2) since nothing ever happens, people will turn even the tiniest thing into a blame war and a nationwide philosophical policy debate. The greatest part is that, when actual pedophiles are caught, they get away with almost nothing.

I do understand where you're coming from, but I was growing up in the 2000s and the (primary & later secondary) school took photos that were shared first on official blogs/sites and then later posted on facebook/twitter without asking for permission.

It's not the photos that are the problem, it's that people don't really understand or respect others' privacy in the internet age.

February before covid, I was at a college in Manchester and was pleasantly surprised when they asked us to complete consent forms on where the photos that were to be taken were going to be uploaded. I was very happy to check the "I don't consent to photos of me shared on social media", consequently they took some photos with me & some without me. No pressure to be part of the group & not be left out.

Is there an actual expectation of privacy when enrolled at a public school? There certainly isn’t when out in truly public places (in the US). And students certainly don’t have any/much right to privacy with their bags and lockers (school employees are allowed to search them, in the US). Between the two, I can’t see there being a compelling legal argument to disallow photos for things that are in full few of tens or hundreds of other people already.

How about "expectation of impermanence"? In the past, people had film, and the farthest any photo got was that person's album. Now every last ass on earth can post their photo in Facebook for all the world to enjoy and it won't ever get taken down. US law needs to catch up.

While I understand the sentiment attached to "expectation of impermanence", as far as I know, that hasn’t been codified federally (or in most/any states) in the US. Administrators don’t get to make rules like this up without a legal basis to do so (well, they can try, but they’ll lose in court). There very may well be some other legal basis for “no photos of kids in public” but I’m not aware of it.

> I can’t see there being a compelling legal argument to disallow photos

> that hasn’t been codified federally

The world is moving faster than law, I'd even go as far as to say that it almost always has been. What gets put into law has to have a common sentiment behind it first.

And not everything that's law means that's how things should be. Even in the US I think some states have the death penalty, others don't. The law does not show some absolute truth.

Your thinking is happening on a plane of law and legal enforcement: "the school can't enforce these rules, they can't stop me from taking photos, it's all legal".

Were it legal to kick a kid and the school had a rule prohibiting it, would you say the same? My thinking isn't about the law at all. It's about what I view as problematic and how I believe things should be; the sentiment that precedes law. I don't have to wait for the law to say that kicking kids shouldn't be happening.

And it's not just the expectation of impermanence. Those photos are forever and for everyone as you say. Reachable by anyone, anytime for whatever reason.

> Is there an actual expectation of privacy when enrolled at a public school?

No. Children in schools don’t have rights, the same way as prisoners don’t have rights. Public and private schools are not different in this respect. As institutions built on dominance and the implied use of force schools could not function in anything resembling a normal fashion if children had rights.

> No. Children in schools don’t have rights, the same way as prisoners don’t have rights.

Tinker would like a word.

I mean, prisoners also have limited rights to free speech, I guess? Think GP meant "rights" to mean "the full spectrum of civil rights private, adult citizens enjoy"

Recently was biking down a city street and saw a pack of tiny kids supervised by two adults, walking down the sidewalk. All the kids wore identical tiny day-glo safety vests, just like adult safety vests but kindergarten-sized. It was the cutest thing and I wanted a photo for my elderly mother-in-law, who would have absolutely loved it. Was late afternoon and the light was perfect, the day-glo was electric.

Then reality hit: I could get in big trouble and my benign motive would be a useless defense. I biked past, lamenting the loss of a terrific photo.

I can’t help but picture you trying to explain to the adults why you would want the photo, and being treated as a potential pedophile… sad.

Sure, publishing is one thing, but not even taking the pictures and/or allowing parents to take them is the problem. It is lazy blame-avoidance backed by some kind of hysteria (if you ask me). Of course they need some consent form if they’re going to post it publicly, but the parent group should not be considered “public” in my opinion.

Thinking of myself as a parent I'd be quite angry if photos of my children ended up on Instagram (private profiles or not) or any company's servers.

So in your place, knowing how brazen everyone is with privacy I'd actually be ok with this measure. It's not like you can't take photos/videos of your children and their friends (with their parents' consent) outside of school & during your time together.

Some 200 years ago photography hadn't even be invented, and only the last ~50 years has it been mainstream. Not every moment has to be recorded, relax, have fun and take a few photos so you can reminisce when older.

I kind of see an argument here: kids can't consent, and once the pic of them doing something stupid gets online, it will never be deleted.

There are notorious "Instagram parents" who post their kids doing embarrasing things and getting pranked. When the kids grow up, what if they don't like those pictures and the attention it gives them?

Even if you're not one of those parents, and have perfectly good intentions, you never know what goes viral. Maybe the picture of your kid gets used as a stock photo by some shady company, it gets millions of views, and now random other kids and adults are harassing them.

That being said, the blanket policy "no pictures, ever" is still ridiculous. They should at least mandate that no pictures should be posted publicly online (which may actually be legally mandated in some places). And even then, the days of viral videos like "charlie bit my finger" are over, the odds of your kid's photo posted in some random facebook group actually becoming viral are exceedingly small.

Not sure if I understood you correctly, but the idea of a policy that protects children from their own parents seems really far-fetched (?). From the other parents, sure; yeah, there is social media and sharing will happen. But when exactly do we go from “a person shared a photo with me in the background in a pose I didn’t like” to “let’s preemptively stop human beings from doing something stupid by prohibiting everything”? Should we really assume that it’s more likely for someone to be shamed by another human being (because of a photo they took) than not? Or, in other words, that the probability of shaming happening is so high it deserves preemptive prohibition? I think we should assume parents are responsible and that the pictures will be a positive memory (then deal with it when it doesn’t happen) than assuming that everyone is a pervert and thus making everyone pay for that.

Many parents are irresponsible or even outright harmful to children.

It would be funny if a social media company had the long term plan to become a legal service for the children of their users. They could sue their parents and the company would get a cut.

Not sure where your kids attend but where we have ours it’s ok for them to take pictures and upload to a private portfolio only available to individual kids parents.

Then there’s a blog where pictures are allowed for kids where the parents pre-approved that they could upload to the blog (available to all parents).

However, yes - parents aren’t allowed to take pictures - of kids other than yours.

He’s in allmänförskola and he’s been in two different schools (Småland) and both were the same. The instagram account is full of headless bodies, arms, and backs.

This annoys me so much. At my 18mo nursery they tell me how she interacts with other children but they can't send picture or video of it, only the random bland picture of her alone doing nothing special or some activity. And after covid is worse, since before we could see them when dropping or picking up, and now have to wait outside... Since I don't know people with children of the same age its hard to see those interactions

But they tell me how she had a boy friend, they would spend all day together, running after one another, call their each other's name, and "talk" a lot

Also a girl friend that sit next to her at lunch, and they spend the entire meal giggling, and trying to feed each other

My dog gets sent to a "doggy day care" occasionally, and they always manage to capture the "nonsense" that the dogs get up to - from speaking to others who live around us they say the same about their dogs there. It's crazy that I have a better window into my dogs social life than you do into your child's.

You just summed it up, unfortunately.

There are fewer perverts looking for dogs playing than looking for pictures of young kids.

Exactly. I don’t understand how we got to the point where people are so scared of some kind of invisible boogeyman that we have to deal with this.

Do you know why the rule was made?

My guess would be that parents are constantly taking photos and getting in the way of kids playing, or their performance, and it's to encourage parents to just enjoy their kids. This sounds like a pretty good rule to me. I'd have to guess that during their childhood your children will have multiple orders of magnitude more photos taken of them. I'd only worry memories will be lost by an overwhelming amount of media being saved about them.

Very idealistic… but no, it’s supposed to prevent the collection and dissemination of photos of children on the internet.

I think that a general law against posting pictures of kids on the internet could just work. It's not just perverts, kids cannot consent to having their images stored in photographic databases forever and being IDed off facial recognition.

Could you just.. do it anyway?

What are they going to do? Kick your kid out? Call the cops? Unlikely in my part of the world, at least.

I think they may well have called the cops.

What would have happened afterwards is hard to say, but once the police get involved... well, bad things have certainly been known to happen.

This is Sweden, people are constantly waiting to make a big fuss about anything that’s irrelevant. I would get yelled at and it would be very uncomfortable, at the very least.

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