A child’s privacy is worth more than likes (2022)
theprivacywhisperer.com
theprivacywhisperer.com
It takes willful blindness at this point not to comprehend how bad the panopticon is for us, and that's before even venturing into more conspiratorial analyses of the real purpose of all this infrastructure and what it's meant to be used for. I've noticed these dismissals will often take the form of a sort of learned helplessness/powerlessness, i.e. "they already know everything about me, so why wouldn't I just hand over my retinal scan, DNA, and images of my private moments?" It's just a method of coping with the subconscious recognition of how bad the situation has become.
My analysis is that the outer party traded off those things effectively for a sense of safety, and the inner party traded off even more for pride. In total the party was only about 20% of the populace.
At any point Winston could have left. The party had obviously created an oppressive wartime environment that made it scary to leave the safety of the party, but Winston had many opportunities to simply walk away.
But he was invested.
And I think that's the parallel I see in modern capitalist society. We're so invested that we cannot imagine walking away. Disposable gadgets, next-day shipping from the comfort of your couch, virtual social scores (either crowd sourced or provided by your ruling party). These things all feed into the sunk cost fallacy that starting over would be too hard.
And maybe it is. Maybe that's why I keep marching with the herd.
But I still assert he could have left. The fear just worked too well on him. Just like it's working on me. I'm too scared to quit this life and start a new one.
He didn't just feel trapped and scared in the book. There was also depiction of him and Julia being kidnapped by members of the Party when they rented a room above the shop. Winston was then tortured both physically, mentally, and emotionally - he never sees Julia again (from what I recall).
He does, they just don't care about each other anymore. By thr end of the book he has been permanently defeated, he could do whatever he wanted, and he didn't want to anymore.
Could he have left, really?
If you are saying that he could have ran away, that's simply wrong too, it would just have been a short lived uncomfortable run before being executed.
The whole point of the narrative is the party is all consuming, all seeing, all hearing and even controls how you think.
‘Simply leave’ wasn’t an option.
Winston knew what it was really like, he knew what the party could do, he knew how little influence he had over his life in the final accounting.
The fear is hollow. The knowing is what got winston.
In contemporary life it's not as clear cut. We want the benefits of tech without the tyrannical control over us. You can't leave or stay to solve it. You have to work hard for a long time to create the boundary against tech that isn't tyrannical, under difficult resourcing conditions and the deck is stacked against you.
The gov doesn't need to be blanket oppressive like 1984. It can be freedom loving for 98% of policies and ram home the 2% that matter to their plans for world domination or whatever.
Every business owner gets to choose to install face recognition cameras or not in their business, sure, freedom. And the government puts them on the streets and in stadiums without public involvement, making any choice about partcipating in the program null and void.
The gov is expert at bullying it's own people, freedom for society's ownership class, and freedom for the gov to do whatever it wants, too.
Now I wonder if those elders were also joking, just didn’t wanted their photos to be taken.
EDIT: I still take plenty of pictures but not too many or share as much. Mostly don’t want my photo to appear in random places. My joke is that if you take too many photos, then you will lose your soul completely.
It's not Islam.
I also don't upload images of either myself or my family, again, not Islam.
There are several cultures that avoid names and images for varying reasons, eg: the use of Kuminjay in Pintubi-Luritja language families.
My parents are from Sunni sect which is the largest sect. But it is further divided into sub-sects. However, you can pick and choose various rules from different sects/imams. Which is good imo but it is hard to say which rule comes from which sect. (Also some of more conservative Muslims believe that their way is the only right way and they tend to push their views/rules).
In Islam, idolatry is a major sin which can render one to ineligible to enter heaven forever. All other sins are forgivable. This is agreed among all Muslims, afaik.
So all Muslim are very anti-idolatry but definition of idolatry varies among various Muslims. On one extreme, mere drawing/photo of a person or animal is forbidden just in case it leads someone worshipping that picture.
Some Muslims consider it idolatry when pictures of kings or leaders are treated in certain "respectful" or "ritual-y" ways. And that is one of the reasons that Muslims don't like pictures of prophets/religious figures as they are not sure how to treat those pictures.
Majority of Muslims, I know, don't think drawings or photography is forbidden as long as you don't perform any sort of rituals like lighting a candle or putting flowers.
As for capturing a part of the soul when taking photos, I don't think the most conservative Muslims who considered photography forbidden believed that a soul can be divided/captured like this. At least, the one I knew rejected this idea for forbidding photography.
The people who used to say that camera can steal a part of soul tended to be more moderate. Maybe there was indeed some moderate sect that believed this but I am not sure. Or now I like to think that it could have been a joke that went "viral" because some people don't like how they look in their photos (or they cared about their privacy).
During hurricane relief trips I make a point of avoiding the org photographers and sometimes they'd made a point of cornering me. I guess they didn't want to miss anyone. When it got to that, I said there were warrants out for my arrest.
actually this sounds much more like paranoia then this:
> I really don't like my face in the corporate surveillance panopticon
which is more close to reality
> on the other hand people are very quick to dismiss anything that sounds like paranoia from anyone.
do they really? All they need is paranoia nicely wrapped into something more digestible and you wrote it yourself…
>Yeah, it's a joke, but it seriously gets more acceptance and understanding
So while one type of “wise” people are building corporations disrespecting people and using other “wise” people who help them without thinking … those who really get frustrated are photographers.
As to the joke about some part of the soul taken.
Photo is not taken. It is made. Preferably by someone who knows what he is doing and it’s more like a part of the soul will be preserved to shine more. It is of course suggesting that subject has a soul in the first place.
This is a belief in the Amish religious community (if you ignore their wishes and take their picture they’ll generally look away from the camera to hide their faces).
"Amish believe any physical representation of themselves (whether a photograph, a painting, or film) promotes individualism and vanity, taking away from the values of community and humility by which they govern their lives."
or
#1. "The second of the ten commandments in the Bible says that we are not to have any graven images. And photos are kind of like graven images. Therefore we don't allow them."
#2. "We believe that having photographs of ourselves is being prideful, or at least it could cause one to have pride. And we teach and believe in practicing humility. So we don't want photos around to create a stumbling block."
and
"The truth is, most of the Amish do not care if you have a photo of them. They know that they are different from the rest of the world. And they are well aware of the fact that many people are fascinated and curious about them."
- You don’t need to be doing a PhD to realize that there’s something weird about sharing your intimate life stories online with strangers. Might be a bit crude, but you’d have to be pretty thick not to consider it.
- This part:
> Social media companies, these corporate giants that have so much influence in today’s culture and the way we connect with each other, are the ones normalizing oversharing and benefiting from it
This is not exactly accurate. Social media companies are not the ones normalizing this behavior, bad parents are. They do benefit from it or even encourage it, but ultimately it’s the parent’s responsibility as they are doing it only for themselves.
Bad parents are not the victim, they are the problem.
I can only imagine what it will be like for these kids once they're older with their whole story plastered all over Instagram.
The bullying definitely was real but his parents mental neglect probably contributed at least as much—if not more—to his trauma.
My kids often say, “this is so cool! Can you get a photo and share it with our friends online?”
Of course, anyone can take that last sentence, render it in their own context without the availability of any details to conclude that I’m a terrible parent. But that’s kind of my point: parenting is partly about making informed, nuanced decisions. You never have the information necessary to make an informed, nuanced criticism.
Remember, always blame individuals for systemic issues.
Using a social network as a journal doesn't imply needing to post anything publicly. There are plenty of private Instagram accounts that people just use to save photos.
Marketing for your personal brand? What on earth does that even mean? I can’t even imagine what “my personal brand” would be let alone how/why I would market it. Get me out of this narcissism dystopia!
This is really pedantic, but nobody has hard drive space on their phone. :P
i would disagree with that claim. at least when i share photos of my children the primary benefit is for my parents, my siblings, and very close friends. it is neither for my own nor my kids benefit.
the point of facebook is to stay in touch with your friends and family, and so it encourages to share with them. i am not on facebook myself, so i don't know how easy it is to create private family/friend groups. if it is easy then it should not be a problem to share family pictures in private, but apparently this is not happening and a lot of people are sharing in public instead? do they believe that only the friends that follow them can see them? never mind the privacy issues of facebook itself.
does it make sense to post it online instead of celebrating it privately with my child or face-to-face with friends
most of my friends and family do not live in the same city as i do. so face-to-face is not an option.
instead of chastising parents for using the tools available to them to stay in touch with their family, how about creating and promoting tools that allow sharing in a private and secure manner?
But it’s definitely less work to make a deal with the social network devil.
Some parents do and others don’t.
Some kids may later resent that. Others won’t.
Yes, the parents should have the sense not to do this but the victims here are the children who can't stop their parents from invading their privacy. Many of them are now old enough to have their own social media accounts and discover what their parents did to them when they were younger. Presumably they aren't happy about what their parents did and I knew they wouldn't be back in the late 00s when this practice was first starting.
In 2015 Facebook launched a feature (Scrapbooks[0]) specifically designed to encourage parents to upload and organise photos of their kids.
Their help centre still has an article under /help/scrapbooks [1] titled "Manage Photos of Your Child" with the first heading "How do I create a scrapbook for my child on Facebook?"
[0] https://about.fb.com/news/2015/03/a-new-way-to-organize-phot...
If you stop social media companies, shitty parents would find another way to sell their kids for promotion. Parents should learn that their behavior is wrong and stop doing it.
The loophole is if some other parent takes a picture at a party or something that includes our kid and posts it. We try to mitigate this by telling The Facebook Moms in very clear terms that if they post pictures including our kid, then we won’t be doing anything with them anymore.
Good to know.
I don't put any responsibility on the kids.
(BTW - "families are responsible for their little kids" was a pretty normal belief long before the first boomer was born.)
All you have to do is chant “personal responsibility” and then there’s no imbalance and no unfairness and it’s all alright and everything’s perfect and it must be the victim’s fault for not being John Galt and immune to advertising like you think you are (but aren’t really because nobody is)
No one is fully immune to advertising but some people are definitely more resilient than others.
To study your example: we are all exposed to pretty much the same level of advertising from Coca Cola. But some of us enjoy it in moderation while others drink it until they are obese and have diabetes.
And regardless of if you drink Coke or not, some people will go the extra length to do basic exercise where as other people do zero exercise.
So yes, there is an element of personal responsibility
Not over time; they are like the Hydraulic Press channel on YouTube which crushes random things in a press, and keeps increasing the pressure until the thing breaks. Big companies will keep pressing on you until you break - they'll be there advertising in the morning when you wake up, at night when you're tired and suffering decision fatigue[1], they'll be in TV shows with product placement so you get memories of seeing 'people like you' drinking Coca Cola in various situations, they'll pay high status people in your area of interest to be associated with their product to influence you by The Halo Effect whether it's a sports star or an investor[2], they'll be on your children's morning cartoons and on the radio station their friends' mom listens to, and in the vending machines at their schools, and on-tap in the bars and restaurants, and branded on all sorts of unrelated merchandise, they'll be beside your commute on billboards, sponsoring your town's stadium and favourite events, donating products to your favourite YouTuber or lobbying your politicians in their interest. And many more than I can think up, and like The Terminator they absolutely will not stop increasing the pressure over time.
And it's effective, world obesity has tripled[3] since 1975.
Mexico has a problem with Coca-Cola, see [4] with quotes like "Coca-Cola “employs strategies to prevent, delay or weaken the regulations that restrict its activities”, the political magazine Proceso alleged last year".
> "But some of us enjoy it in moderation while others drink it until they are obese and have diabetes."
From [3] "39 million children under the age of 5 were overweight or obese in 2020." - it's good to know they're just lazy and indulgent and irresponsible infants and there's no systemic problem whatsoever.
From [4] "while making the [documentary on Coca-Cola promotional techniques] she met people who consumed large amounts of fizzy drinks who were unaware they had type 2 diabetes. “People who were blind or had limbs amputated often have no idea that it was due to their high blood sugar level,” she says." - it's good to know they weren't uneducated, lacking access to good schooling and doctors who can explain or the education to understand the explanations, or lacking alternatives like clean water[5], they're just irresponsible and that makes it fine for them to be ground up by the capitalism mill. "Buffeted by the dual crises of the diabetes epidemic and the chronic water shortage, residents of San Cristóbal have identified what they believe is the singular culprit: the hulking Coca-Cola factory on the edge of town."
"The plant is owned by Femsa, a food and beverage behemoth that owns the rights to bottle and sell Coca-Cola throughout Mexico [...] Femsa is one of Mexico’s most powerful companies; a former chief executive of Coca-Cola in Mexico, Vicente Fox, was the country’s president from 2000 to 2006." - all you need to be immune to that is Common Sense, it's just Common Sense, just resist the ever-increasing pressure for the rest of your life without ever failing and be sure to never object because it's your fault if you give in.
"In San Juan Chamula, bottled soda anchors religious ceremonies cherished by the city’s indigenous Tzotzil population." - but it's easy to go against your local religion, everyone does it, right?
"Many Tzotzil believe carbonated soda has the power to heal the sick. Mikaela Ruiz, 41, a local resident, recalls how soda helped cure her infant daughter, who was weak from vomiting and diarrhea. The ceremony was performed by her diabetic mother" - Humans definitely aren't subject to any inherent cognitive bias about correlation and causation or anything, everyone is rational - and if they aren't, it's their fault which makes it fine to exploit them.
But those religious people must be dumb why would they think of fizzy drinks as a religious thing? Oh this is why "Local health advocates say aggressive marketing campaigns by Coke and Pepsi that started in the 1960s helped embed sugary soft drinks into local religious practices".
"the Femsa spokesman [...] rejected criticisms that the company’s beverages have had a negative impact on public health. Mexicans, he said, may have a genetic proclivity toward diabetes." - lying, gaslighting. Just be a perfect lie detector, it's common sense, it's just common sense, self-actuate your way out of basic human millenia-old respect for those higher on social hierarchies.
"Ms. Abadía, the security guard, said she blamed herself for drinking so much soda. Still, with her mother’s health deteriorating, and having watched her father die from complications from diabetes, she can’t help but fear for her own well-being. “I’m worried I’ll end up blind or without a foot or a hand,” she said. “I’m very scared.”" - why doesn't she just stop? Giving up addiction is easy, just take responsi... oh there isn't any drinkable water, right, yes, still that's probably her fault too somehow.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_fatigue
[2] https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=warren+buffet+coca+cola+&ia...
[3] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/obesity-and...
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/nov/04/s...
[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/14/world/americas/mexico-coc...
Coca-cola is an accepted and normalized aspect of daily life. Because of the extremely effective marketing - it is viewed as 'safe' and something everyone should have, so parents buy it for their children - despite the obvious and well-known effects as well as becoming subtly addicted to caffeine that is in them. The kids are being primed to become lifelong caffeine addicts.
Do you drink caffeinated drinks regularly? Have you tried going without them? It's a bitch.
Frankly it's suspicious that you had to go to Mexico to get good examples.
>oh there isn't any drinkable water
Okay well I live in the united states and we have drinkable water. So then what?
> "39 million children under the age of 5 were overweight or obese in 2020." - it's good to know they're just lazy and indulgent and irresponsible infants and there's no systemic problem whatsoever.
You're making up a straw man if you think I'm attacking children under 5 for not having personal responsibility. But yes, I do blame these cases on bad parenting.
I did not "have to go to Mexico" to get good examples, first thing which came to mind was those articles about Mexico. The link about obesity tripling is from the World health organization.
Let's assume for a moment that you live in the USA - the USA also has a problem with massively increasing obesity levels, see[1] the CDC saying the prevalence of obesity has increased from 30% to 40% in the last twenty years. Before you say "nobody trusts the CDC after COVID", the National Institute of Health says obesity in the USA has tripled since 1960[3] from around 13% to around 42%.
In case you think the political connection is Mexican developing corruption, here's [4] The CocaCola company saying "Coca‑Cola engages in direct advocacy at U.S. federal and state levels of government to share information and perspective on our public policy priorities." and their most recent disclosure Q1 2023 includes specific lobbying issues "Water security, replenishment, restoration." Should "water security for CocaCola company bottling plants" ever come into conflict with "water security for citizens" you can guess which side CocaCola will be lobbying on.
> "Okay well I live in the united states and we have drinkable water. So then what?"
Drought.gov reports that 90 million people in the USA and 266 million areas of major crops are experiencing drought this week[5]. California, for example, pumps huge amounts of groundwater for growing almonds for export and when the ground collapses into the holes where water used to be, it compacts meaning the ground can hold less water in future, reducing the groundwater storage capacity. An NPR article[6] says "Upmanu Lall, a hydroclimatologist at Columbia University and a luminary in his field, has co-authored and led numerous studies that document the rise of contaminated drinking water in the U.S. He and his colleagues assessed a national data set of 17,900 water utilities and other community drinking-water systems, revealing that water-quality violations of the U.S. Safe Drinking Water Act more than doubled between 1980 and 2015" - this is general underinvestment in infrastructure causing problems like 150k people in Jackson, Miss. getting undrinkable water - a systemic problem because supplying drinking water isn't as profitable as supplying sugar water, so that's where the economy allocates more funds and more efforts.
In the UK, Thames Water is a supplier in London - by far the biggest and densest city in the country - and since it was privatised it's £14Bn in debt[7] - basically taken £14bn in loans to pay out to shareholders, underinvesting and cost cutting in providing the service people need, a story played out around the UK with £50Bn in debts by private water companies, echoing the systemic problems with clean water supplies in the Mexican story. Getting away from pressure of advertising but still talking about systemic pressures to increase profits and payouts more than to provide best service, pressures which companies have huge resources to crush individuals, which individuals have almost no ability to resist.
So then you've taken "companies are more powerful than individuals and humans have known cognitive weaknesses which companies exploit which is a systemic problem with advertising and manipulation around the world and accross all companies and in the nature of the economies we run" to "examples of CocaCola specifically, affecting a specific community in Mexico, using a lot of different influences at local and state level with many different approaches and methods" to "I have clean water so there isn't a systemic problem at all" which is a non-sequitur - "I don't drink CocaCola" is not evidence that advertising generally doesn't work, or a refutation of the idea that pressure increases over time, or a response to the inhumanity of industries which exploit human weaknesses for profit on a vast scale to the detriment of human dignity, health, society and quality of life.
> "You're making up a straw man if you think I'm attacking children under 5 for not having personal responsibility. But yes, I do blame these cases on bad parenting."
39 million cases of '''bad parenting'''. Don't question the system, this is all the explanation anyone should need, case closed.
Don't look at "How to 'magnetize' a baby [with sugar]"[8], how babies crying has a disproportional effect on adults, how 'getting people hooked early' is a trick to affect the rest of their lives used by cults and religions and others, how the adults are increasingly stressed which causes more bad decision making, by an environment where housing is for rentier profit, where vehicle ownership is mandatory after years of car industry lobbying and marketing rebuilding cities around cars, where manipulative marketing and lies "yes junk food can be part of a healthy diet [coughinmoderation]" abounds, where companies do things like buy up shelf space in supermarkets to put their products front and center, use manipulations such as putting a photo of a baby on product packaging to imply that it's child related or child safe, and increasing contrast and colour to make it look 'friendlier' 'more noticable', and etc. etc.
But no, blaming the parents is the important thing to reassure you; you're on top so there can't be any systemic problems.
btw. if you reply with something as empty as "I don't eat almonds" or "my parents were bad and I turned out fine", you're missing all the points.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html
[2] https://usafacts.org/articles/obesity-rate-nearly-triples-un...
[3] https://usafacts.org/articles/obesity-rate-nearly-triples-un...
[4] https://www.coca-colacompany.com/policies-and-practices/publ...
[5] https://www.drought.gov/current-conditions
[6] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-growing-drinkin...
[7] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jun/30/in-charts-h...
[8] https://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/how-to-magnetize-a-... - "Dr. Barnard also discusses how industry, aided by government, exploits these natural cravings, pushing us to eat more and more unhealthy foods."
Do you have any sources for that? I'd like to read more on this.
They weren't people who decided to attack or harass others - THEY WERE BRAINWASHED.
If anything bad happens, it's the 10 billionaires at the top who poisoned them, every other human is a saint would never think to attack or harass anyone on their own accord.
You know how jaywalkers are at fault when hit by a car? Who do you think spread that idea around America? "Automobile interests in the US took up the cause of labeling and scorning jaywalkers in the 1910s and early 1920s"[1]. And that isn't the case in other countries. People who saw the same marketing messages from the same people to believe the same things, who would think it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaywalking#Origin_of_the_term
Yes, except all of the people who don’t.
Let’s do a little experiment. Pick any 1 position or belief that I don’t hold and you brainwash me into it. Of course, you won’t be able to. Why not?
Edit: by the way are you even from the US? Or are you just speculating about what it’s like over here? Because the way you speak about jaywalking is completely alien to anyone actually living over here. Everyone jaywalks all the time; No one ever actually gets in trouble. And when cars hit people, it’s definitely the people driving that get in trouble
Facebook is specifically looking for what gets the most from their users, so if you insist on a nature reference then ophiocordyceps unilateralis would be… still wrong, but closer.
And also in this analogy the cordyceps zombie apocalypse already happened, but again, yes I do know it's a very weak analogy.
Well... yes?
I'm struggling to come up with any definition of "fault" that wouldn't agree with your statement there.
It doesn't matter to us when nature is at fault for something, because we can't punish it. But where does the idea come from that when you get hypothermia, that might not be the fault of the weather?
Parents make unwise choices in disclosing information about their children on social media. Certainly. One can debate whether it is for "Likes" as a measure of social capital or something else. But the social media companies and their symbiotic ecosystem have been anything but forthright about how they use the digital trail of such disclosures. The cohort of readers here understands it well; the wider world not so much. The dramatic asymmetry of information (what I know about their usage practices vs what they know about me and my children) virtually guarantees that I can't make a fully informed choice about what I disclose or whether I choose to do it at all.
They may be "normalizing" it, but they're definitely being "enabled" by the social media companies who create the actual "benefit" that drives the behavior in the first place.
It makes me think of the California Child Actor's Bill[0], and how it sets up "Coogan Trusts." The law requires the _employer_ to set aside money into a trust completely bypassing the parents. It seems to recognize that any amount of money injected into a parent and child relationship creates unique strains that do need to be considered directly.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Child_Actor%27s_Bil...
Enabling bad behaviour because it makes you money is quite literally exploitative and therefore reprehensible. But really, it is no different than what bad parents do: refusing to stop and consider they are not actively contributing to a better world.
It’s not an either/or situation. I would argue they are both.
Generally speaking I'm sharing with friends and family ... there's more to it than likes when it comes to human social activity IMO. I feel like this post boils it down to too little.
As for the consequences such as cyber bullying. Is the idea here is some bully at school one day might find some other child's photo and that spurs the bullying?
That sounds like "hide your shameful pics someone might be mean" and IMO completely misses the whole bullying situation. That sounds like a horrible (and frankly childish) way to live life/ teach your kids.
This whole topic is often so generalized (how much sharing are we even talking about), driven by fear, that it doesn't make any sense and the mysterious consequences a sorta boogie man.
Not much has changed with social media. If I had to guess, many people that get pictures of kids shared with them like and comment out of politeness, not genuine interest. So I don't get why the collateral damage of also sharing those pictures with Mark Zuckerberg and various ad companies is worth it.
I also think there’s a huge difference between scrolling through a few dozen pictures on my terms vs being trapped in a slide show in someone’s home.
It's not so much the bullying part itself, it's people documenting you as a person and picking apart everything you've shared to paint you as a character. People online are absolutely rutheless, there's entire forums and communities dedicated to documenting people they find interesting.
The internet is not a safe place, and it never will be, no matter how much the big social medias want you to feel safe sharing your most intimate moments to an audience of literally everyone on planet earth.
Agreed. Referring to it as a "dopamine hit" doesn't help. Those chemicals in our brains aren't scary demons to avoid. From the view of evolutionary psychology, they remain because they led to beneficial behaviors. In this case, social bonding. If my wife posts pictures of our toddler on Facebook, and my mom hits the Like button, my wife will get a small dopamine hit from it. If that were all that's going on, it'd be a good thing. I'm glad my mom can see my kid having fun. I'm glad my wife can bond with her mother-in-law.
The problem is social media companies making a focused effort to (1) exploit user content for purposes the user would never want, like building a profile for targeted advertising, and (2) specifically targeting the action-dopamine-repeat loop to maximize engagement.
For an example of an alternative that (hopefully) isn't as terrible, my grandmother has a digital picture frame from Skylight. I can send pictures to an email address for that frame, and they'll show up in the rotation. I get a "dopamine hit" when I receive an email saying she liked one of my photos, or when she tells me herself. Dopamine's still there, but the system doesn't suck.
ok, hopefully most people have a better relationship with their parents, but i do think for many it does come down to either being able to explain to them the dangers of social media so that they get it, or accepting their parents actions, because threatening your parents that they can't see the kids of they don't stop is in most cases not a healthy move.
At some point one has to ask oneself: what's the best outcome for my child?
to me, a good relationship with my parents (and inlaws) and between my children and their grandparents is more important than preventing any photos made of them.
However, it's more than just preventing photos. It's about respecting boundaries. At some point your parents need to respect your authority in your children's lives. They're your children, not your parents children. Ultimately you are responsible for their wellbeing. They should be supporting your parenting, not undermining it.
This, obviously, is one issue among many, and may not be representative of a broader pattern. From your hesitation it sounds like this is one disagreement in an otherwise healthy dynamic. Again, you know better than us. But if it is a pattern, I encourage you to play that pattern forward. If your parents don't respect your boundaries, what does it look like if your parents don't respect your children's boundaries as they grow?
we seem to have different priorities. to some here it seems of primary importance that their parents respect their boundaries. to me, forgiveness, tolerance and a healthy relationship with my family is more important, and my boundaries that i don't want violated are much tighter.
This is exactly the way it is supposed to work.
Sad to hear that the commenters parents care more for cultivating their social media presence than the wishes of their own child.
to me a good relationship with my parents is more important than staying out of facebook.
I guess we just see things differently. To me a "good relationship with my parents" involves mutual respect of boundaries. It shouldn't even get to the point of threats.
I understand that for some and maybe even yourself this may be an unlikely outcome or you might just think it not worth the effort on this particular issue given how pervasive social media already is.
They're mad about it. I don't care.
Really glad now.
Thankfully, Facebook said they have stopped facial recognition. Here’s hoping it wasn’t a lie.
We have thousands of photos and videos. When he's old enough he can post them everywhere if he wants. But that's his business. Not ours.
I don’t care if the next one would have gotten 10 million views. I deleted that video and immediately made a follow up explaining the situation to the thousands of people that had followed me from that one video. Your child’s safety and right to future privacy should always be the forefront, and I’m ashamed to say I even slipped up one time. Don’t post that stuff. Send it to your family and move on.
I've seen this worry expressed before, but I don't understand it.
Do you feel like your son is more likely to be a victim of a given predator that comes across the video because it went viral? Or some other consequence?
That doesn't seem likely at all considering sexual assault or similar IIRC is usually done by someone you know already.
I don’t really see a case that it would be good for them to mass distribute videos of their formative years, even if it isn’t directly harmful.
It seems like something people fear and let that drive their choices without it being very likely or having consequences.
Reflect my guy.
The child didn't consent to this sort of usage, that's for one.
Would you be comfortable with your identity being used in ways you don't approve of?
My mum used to have a physical album of family pictures, most of which were hugely embarrassing. But, at least, I had some control who could view these. Some came into my possession after she died and I did not hesitate to destroy each and every one of them.
I learned from this the dishonest attempts at "making right" were exactly that: dishonest.
My own mother had a streak for photographing nudes (myself included) and she "promised" that these had all been destroyed. They had not. They now are.
And it was extremely embarrassing, but not because of its subject matter. It was embarrassing because, for decades, my mother used it as a weapon against me. It was one of those things to emasculate and humiliate me for being a boy and for having a natural body. It was a way to tease me and implemented as a source of shame.
It was just another brick in the wall, of course, but unfortunately I didn't get proper access to burn it when I had the chance. It might still exist, for all I know. I may perhaps eventually get a golden opportunity for final satisfaction.
Imagine a semi-pro photographer, focusing on childhood photography. The photos are of course not any candid moments, celebrating the kids birthdays or sharing their lives. It’s staged, often with professional lights, heavily Photoshopped, etc. Telling a “story” rather than showing the photographed person - they are basically actors. Clearly, FB et al. would be great for finding clients, or just sharing the work with people who enjoy this kind of art.
Do you think it’s OK to post such images, provided the parents’ give their consent? Do you think it’s OK to post such images of the photographer’s own kids?
EDIT: Should have mentioned that there's no reason to link the models' identity on social media. It's not captioned as "Picture of David Oberon, 6yo from Seattle" but rather "Picture of a little inventor, working on a cool new machine".
We have CGI now.
Baby showers, gender reveal parties, pre-partum stays at "mom suites" in spas/hotels, all those Instagram moments that make people feel stressed and like they're not in the right income bracket to get into having a family.
Save your money, folks. Spend it on high-quality toys, books, childhood travel. Save money so you have to work less and can spend time together. That's what your child will benefit from.
We had a wonderful midwife who told us her secondary function was basically to reality-check parents on what gear, clothes, events, price points, etc. they actually need. Get the basics right, she would say, and deeply understand why they are basic and necessary, and otherwise save your time and money for stuff that matters long-term.
Given that she’s raised four kids, I tend to believe her.
No need for boys or girls clothes, the dressing up thing is really for adults
Your 70 year-old mother is right. There really is so much useless shit for babies now, and very little of it actually solves a real problem that new parents have.
The rules of thumb for us are:
- Don't buy anything until you actually have an imminent need for it. Simplest way to avoid useless shit altogether!
- Where possible, get used on FB Marketplace or Gumtree. It's generally 80% cheaper than new, and you can resell when you're done to get the money you spent on it back. (Or, just give away to friends)
- Get products with less features, not more. When you're sleep deprived and stressed to the end of your tether, the last thing you want to do is work out how a whole lot of different attachments work. If you don't have a pram yet, the Baby Joggers are great at this. They do one thing (single-handed compact fold) and do it well.
Now, he's getting bigger, meaning those $3 dollar pjs now cost $9, as it's more cloth to create, but the sentiment is still there!
I understand it's a Substack, but something about that just felt jarring given the subject matter.
Privacy is about giving people the freedom to choose how their personal information is distributed. Sounds like they are respecting your privacy.
That's one take, and I won't argue that it's an unreasonable one.
That said, if you asked me to describe the UX patterns I might expect to find on a privacy-respecting website, interrupting me to ask me for personal information probably wouldn't be on that list. I probably also wouldn't have expected to see the third-party tracking pixels from Cloudflare, Datadog, and Google, etc.
That's okay. It's not egregious, it's just a bit odd, like if you were reading Apache documentation on a site served by IIS.
Even on HN, theres's people complaining about things that happen to them because they are not running an adblocker.
You want privacy? That's the place to start.
Hit it on the head there. Taking photos takes you outside the experience. It's the reason I take very few photos when I'm traveling. (I can understand ppl wanting to take them in that context, but it does make your travel different.)
My biggest fear is their photos/videos popping up in wrong places. Heck, with instagram being used basically as a "flesh" market for women, there are parents dressing their toddlers in outfits that are for grown ups that frankly make me wonder if the government ought to remove their children.
There are some truly sick individuals out there and parents need to stay vigilant to avoid tragedies.
What I find wrong is parents just showing off their kids for likes, a occasional bday pic is fine but every freaking meal or play day is just screams, I need likes today
* They need support from their friends, so they post on FB.
* They may need advice on choosing a course of treatment, finding a specialist, etc. Ideally you are already working with a competent doctor/team but that's not a given.
One example immediately comes to mind that took two years of "working the system" before an actionable and effective diagnosis was produced. That's exactly the kind of thing finding the correct community on a social network really helps with.
So I don't think it's always clear what to do.
(I can remember one example irritated me to no end, some CTO posted a pictures of his wife working from home with two babies trying to play with her. Really poor taste IMO).
I can understand being proud and happy about the new arrival and wanting to shout it from the roof tops. But my logical side said "she's too young to decide if she wants her picture on the internet".
When my eldest was born I posted the following note on my Facebook wall:
Today, I met you. My words cannot adequately express the hope and happiness you bring to your mother and I. After months of anticipation we are delighted that you are here and healthy, safe and sound.
Like all parents we want to protect you and nourish your individuality. Today I'm making a promise: your identity is yours alone to express.
In this digital era, we share more, more often. But that decision to share is not one we will make for you, we won't create an online presence for you. Only you can decide how you want to be seen by the world.
I later realised that I had posed this on the day they were born, revealing their legal date of birth. I screen-shotted the original, deleted it and then reposted it, adding the following quote:
I don’t share photos of my son online because he hasn’t consented to that sharing, and doesn’t understand what posting photos online means.
I have seen friends post photos of their children on Facebook/Instagram while potty training and in the bath. Who knows how much those kids are going to get bullied in middle / high school when a classmate finds those photos, makes a meme out of them or prints them out and posts them around the school. All because their parents were chasing a dopamine high from a few likes.
It's great to see kids like Gwyneth Paltrows' pushing back[0] against their parents oversharing very publicly, creating a great example for other kids, empowering them to stand up to their parents oversharing.
We've posted or shared some limited photos but never ones that show his face.
it's not, but that doesn't mean it is a good idea to just refuse them. unless the relationship is seriously broken, it is always a good idea to to try to work on the relationship with your parents and avoid making it worse. if this is the only issue i'd have with my parents, it would be better to try to resolve the issue instead of rejecting them.
I think people may be projecting some very strange personal feelings about their parents on people they don't know.
possibly, but i get the same impression from your message too. you may have reasons for your choice that are not visible from your post, which is fine for your choice. but because i can't see those reasons (and it would be out of place to share them here) i have to interpret your message based on the context available.
For a long time, their two young children were featured in all their videos, acting, engaging and interacting as a family.
Perhaps a year ago, first their daughter and then their son vanished from the videos, without much explanation. And I think that it sort of dawned on them that people may have viewed it as exploitative or unwholesome that their children had become, essentially, employees without much of a choice in the matter.
So while I miss their witty presence in the videos, I do commend the family on doing the right thing and letting their children be kids, off-camera, and perhaps when they come to adulthood, they can make a free choice to rejoin the comedy skits and music videos.
They started by sending private snapchat messages to our family. My wife screenshotted the cute baby picture, google uploaded it automatically to their backup/photo storage.
Game over.
Heck, walk into walmart, your face and your family are all scanned and added into their security database.
Its a fools errand.
I can think of few uses for privacy, overthrowing a government, embarrassing fetish, a medical illness that would cause people to treat you differently, yet none of those are showing your kids being kids online.
By 4 years old, my kid was on social media, because he went to a birthday party and a stranger took a picture.
Would be weird having everyone but the children go around the great grandparents when the great grandparents turn 100.
When they are on a soccer team, they don't take a team photo?
All because we are afraid a face is going to do what exactly? Reminds me of the whole 'don't put your last name on the internet'.
You can debate whether that's a good idea. You can even debate whether you think the connection is real (but I think the feeling of a connection is enough to consider it "real"). You can certainly debate the use of these images in corporate machine-generated ads... but deal with the first paragraph: I think we understand why genuine people might still post on social media.
or are the parents (which they most likely were) of your childs friends strangers to you? they should not be.
what bothers me here is that on the one hand we have this concept of stranger-danger, and on the other everyone is a stranger, just because you haven't talked to them yet? that doesn't make sense. calling the parents of my kids friends strangers just feels very wrong to me.