We Post Nothing About Our Daughter Online
slate.com
slate.com
On one hand, they indicate strongly valued privacy with the "no posts about the child" rule; seemingly recognizing the hidden costs of permissive 'oversharing'.
But, on the other hand, they place a very high importance on reserving (vanity) domain and user names, securing the right for her to sharecrop out her personal information in as-accurate-a-means as possible; reinforcing the value and importance of being able to overshare?
e.g. Reserving JaneAnnSmith.com at birth to ... what? Spare her the inconvenience/indirection of someone else buying that domain in the intervening years and her having to instead register jasmith.com or (heaven forbid) jane-ann-smith.com ?
Securing facebook.com/janeannsmith to spare her facebook.com/123456789 or something?
And does anyone even think for a moment that it's likely for today's real-name-based social networks will be relevant, years from now?
Reserving a Facebook name today is akin to having reserved a geocities name, at birth, for a child who will graduate high school next year -- and that's for the earliest of early adopters. Were the name registered for a child born around geocities peak, that child may still be in junior high.
The ephemeral nature of these networks (over such time frames) only further underscores the apparent importance the parents are placing on precisely identifying her online history. (getting that facebook username just in case it's still relevant...)
It seems rather than teaching their child to value privacy, to understand the power/benefit dynamic of these networks, to hopefully avoid her growing up forever linked to juvenile mis-steps, they're instead raising her to be a narcissist.
That is: Not to value her privacy and personal identity in and of themselves, but to value privacy and personal identity as a tool to 'spin' her public identity in the most-favorable fashion.
(Personally my wife and I have no information on our kids online, save a self-hosted blog with a password that only family know...).
But the article isn't about privacy conscientiousness, it's about brand conscientiousness.
The author isn't talking about how she might construct rules to effect a safe space for her daughter to grow and learn and internalize these values, separate from known pitfalls that might cause her harm.
The author talks only about how she constructed a safe space for her daughter's brand, separate from whatever might befall her daughter while she's maturing.
It's might seem like a minor distinction, but it doesn't feel that way to me. It makes the whole article feel essentially disingenuous.
The idea is to get out ahead of all the social networking bits, and create a deliberately blank slate. All of that stuff is placeholder, neutral, for as long as the kid wants it to be so. The kid's free to fill all that in, or not, but the child won't start with a bunch of their personal data filled in. That last part is consistent with the stated beliefs/goals of the author, bearing in mind that over time data only accretes and there's no undo.
Yet the article is entirely about the account names and only somewhat in passing about the sorts of lessons the author hopes her daughter learns about "how (not) to conduct yourself online".
And without those lessons... you can 'protect' facebook.com/janeannsmith all you want, but if your daughter makes privacy-eroding mistakes with reddit.com/u/sparklepony2031 -- those can be trivially connected to facebook.com/janeannsmith the second you hand over the 'keys' to that account.
That's the whole point about the loss of privacy online. Once the accounts are associated to you, those associations last forever and follow you immediately and irrevocably anywhere else an account becomes associated to you.
[1] sure, sure -- using your real name as a username is Bad For Privacy, but the author wasn't talking about janeannsmith vs sparklepony2031. They were talking about janeannsmith vs jane-ann-smith and janeannsmith vs janineannsmith -- should jane ann smith have turned out to be the name of a porn star or third world dictator or some such.
Frankly, as far as privacy goes via name conflicts, you're better off being named Mike Johnson and having lots of collisions, even if some are negative, than having some unique name that doesn't have an online association yet. Some plausible deniability is better than none.
However, for branding, the opposite is true. Which, again, underscores how the author's behavior seems to be much more about branding than privacy.
Surely in the future there will be a better way of differentiating ourselves than "john-doe.com", "johndoe.com", "jdoe.me", etc. And what happens when JohnDoe #1 and John Doe #2 are famous people? Who gets the "verified" badge on social networks? It isn't sustainable, and Facebook and others are bound to change this sooner or later.
It's great to see someone treat their child's privacy with some value, instead of using them as a way to endear themselves to virtual friends or get laughs and votes on reddit, while putting photos and information out there about their kid, without the kid's permission, that will be there forever. The rest of us had the opportunity to come to the internet in a time when someone wasn't putting our information out there.
Reserving accounts at places on their behalf, as well as domains, is also a smart choice. It isn't placing importance on anything. It is simply giving their child the option to have these things in the future. Hopefully, facebook won't exist when this kid grows up. But there's a chance it might. And if it does, then this kid doesn't have to compete with someone else taking the name. More importantly, it prevents someone else from pretending to be you.
I have to do this with my name, too. I have an account on Facebook, though I despise it. Same with the other big social networks and other things I don't use. I have been on the receiving end of someone who was upset with me (one a user I banned from my site after defrauding other users) and did things like make an account under my name and put awful stuff out there as "me". That would be more difficult to do if I'd already staked my claim to that identity (even if I didn't use it).
What these parents are doing is simply investing in retaining the tools with which their child will someday be able to safeguard their privacy and - if necessary - build their professional or other identity. It's worthwhile, today. It'll be even more worthwhile in the future.
Really, I fail to see how anyone can have any problem with this.
What I don't get is the disconnect between their claim that oversharing is bad and privacy is good, but their actions that underscore a belief that Facebook is really, really important.
But seriously, anyone who thinks facebook will be important 10 years from now doesn't know anyone aged 14 to 18. Many articles like this are popping up: http://business.time.com/2013/03/08/is-facebook-losing-its-c...
I don't think parents can truly understand that their kids don't want to be on the same "network" as some of them.
P.S. - Doesn't apply to the flock, just the shepherds. The flock will follow when they feel it's necessary.
At least, that is how I interpreted the references to "Facebook" every five words.
I don't know about you, but I use social networks to share photos with my real friends. Why would I want virtual friends?
The article struck me as paranoid, but I agree with your assessment that the authors' reserving their kids' digital real estate is not contradictory with the authors' concern -- it leaves the choice up to the child.
As a general rule, it's pretty safe to "do what everybody else is doing." If Facebook albums parents made for kids when they were little come back to haunt this coming generation as a group, the ills will be remedied either by making or using certain sorts of analysis illegal (the college application hypothetical) or society will adapt by adjusting perceptions of certain information (the prom date hypothetical).
It is illustrative to note how the national reaction to youth drug use in presidential candidates changed from Clinton ("I didn't inhale") to G.W.B. to Obama ("maybe a little blow"). Similar adaptation will happen when it comes to information on Facebook and the like.
I noticed this rule after the housing crash. If one person was underwater on their mortgage, no one would blink. But, when hundreds of thousands of people become underwater, Congress started to get involved to (attempt to) provide relief.
It seems impossible to limit someone's exposure on Facebook, especially when any 3rd party will happily post a photo of your family member online. I also suspect that untagging a person on FB is analogous to FB's soft-deleting of statuses. The damage is already done.
Considering that hundrends of thousadns still lost their houses, it's not much of a comfort -- or good advice in general.
"Do what everybody else is doing" will at best lead to mediocre results (by definition).
Consider the effect of such an advice to someone in a slum neighborhood where "everybody" is dealing drugs, to get the worst case scenario.
Hundreds of thousands also had portions of their mortgages forgiven. One can also not deny that the Fed is keeping interest rates low, in part, because many home owners have HELOCs or other adjustable rate loans.
I agree with you that "doing what everybody else is doing" is not a free pass to be reckless and is not something to aspire to do.
There was an article recently that said that startups shouldn't innovate in non-core areas. This is precisely the advice of "do what everyone else is doing" at least for certain things.
If I'm on a bridge, and people are jumping off en masse, then one of two things is happening:
1. They've all been mentally affected, in which case, I almost certainly am too, or;
2. They know something I don't.
It's disingenuous to throw out a contrived example of a herd of people nonsensically jumping off a bridge. If that many people are jumping off a bridge, you probably should too, because they probably know something you don't (yet).
"Imagine reading this on CNN: 'Many fled their vehicles and jumped from the bridge. Those who stayed behind...'"
I don't think anyone is forced to use it. I know several families who have account, yet, they don't share on it or use it for anything that could be embarrassing in the later years.
> especially when any 3rd party will happily post a photo of your family member online.
You should always explain to your friends what your expectation of privacy is. If they don't respect that, they are not your friends anyway.
Shadow profiles http://www.dailydot.com/news/facebook-shadow-profiles-privac...
Yeah, I was almost afraid that I had bought too small of a house, knowing that I would have to pay for my share of the mortgage bailout in extra taxes and value lost to inflation, I might as well buy the most ridiculous crib I could get financing for. Right? But then it came to pass that those bailout programs never really did much for underwater and overextended homeowners. Of course, none of that really makes me feel better, except that I can still afford my mortgage.
"So, you put $10,000 of renovations into your kitchen. That increases the book value by $50,000."
Uh, what?
All sorts of people, for all sorts of reasons, were whole-heartedly drinking /that/ Kool Aid.
Obligatory Godwin law reference aside, this logic has led to many historical problems
In this case, the social friction itself is what would be possibly causing issues in the future, so lowering it would be improving the situation.
If you want to reference the Nazis, then it's the same thing. Doing what everyone was doing had lower social friction in Nazi Germany.
Whether or not this is a good or valid comparison, I think the argument about "if everyone are sharing, nobody will care" is plain wrong. In the right circumstances, it will always be possible to find some nugget of information to paint you in a bad light or cause you problems.
Either way, it's going to be very interesting to watch our future politicians lives be completely exposed down to the smallest detail, as it may be 20-30 years from now.
Don't break the mold without a proper reason to. Now, are privacy issues going to come back and bit kids today in the ass? Maybe, I know I haven't always used my real name online, most people from my generation haven't. I figure that the kids who do are the ones breaking the mold now... I'm on the edge in that case.
The comment specifically says "As a general rule, it's pretty safe...".
I'd say, given the historical track record of governments during the last 100 years, that it's very gullible to believe that whatever future problems our current data sharing will cause will somehow be "fixed" and not have consequences just as long as it affects a critical mass of the population.
For that matter, parts of our government like the NSA and the DEA consider the over-sharing of personal data on Facebook to be a useful source of exploitable information. They'd probably quietly lobby against any legislation to scale it back.
But son.... all the other parents are doing it!
Let me guess. She'll probably reject that envelope for the following reasons:
1. The account is known to be compromised (being under a third party control). Even if parent credentials could be removed, there's still a possibility they could gain access with social engineering with support, as they know detailed history of the account.
2. Unless she's completely monitored and barred from any network access, she'd probably already have another set of accounts by that time. Otherwise would signify she doesn't need any.
3. By that time she'd have her own perception of her own identity, that would be likely (but not necessarily) different from her parents' view of the time she didn't have much of personality - which is enough of a reason to reject the mismatching accounts and create ones to her own tastes.
"Ya, rite M&P. I'll get rite on this and... whatever..." rolling her eyes as her attention returns to the table top augmented reality reality show where she virtually lives with all her favorite Disney, Nickelodeon, Fox, ESPN, Democrat, Republican, Tea Party, and Occupy celebrities.
Really, if I were her, I would gladly accept the domain names and accounts she squatted and point them to her own accounts. Really, not everyone (and I would actually major most don't) want github.com/<fullname>.
> With her name decided, we spent several hours registering her URL and a vast array of social media sites. All of that tied back to a single email account, which would act as a primary access key. We listed my permanent email address as a secondary -- just as you'd fill out financial paperwork for a minor at a bank. We built a password management system for her to store all of her login information.
> On the day of her birth, our daughter already had accounts at Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and even Github. And to this day, we’ve never posted any content.
While I can definitely understand the sentiment and have thought about doing similar things, seeing it all laid out like this seems very strange.
1) Is your twitter/gmail username really that important? Is this sort of personal pre-SEO really that much of an issue? And if it is, won't that just put enormous pressure on new services every generation as people want the slate (username and searchability) wiped clean for themselves?
2) Shouldn't setting all of this up be something your kid eventually does (or that you help them do)? Isn't the presumption that your kid wants a Facebook and Github account a pretty specific one?
The thing that is most bizarre is they care so much about protecting the kids online identity yet they registered real names. What if the kid wants to use an alias? I find it all a bit odd.
I completely get keeping pictures off of facebook. This setting up a virtual identity.. its weird.
In 2028 there will be nothing embarrassing about appearing in thousands of online photos dating back to your birth. Because almost everyone will be in the same boat.
In fact, it may be considered weird and suspicious if there's not much online content about you.
Or you know, those that aren't will have it as an advantage.
Like how everybody is nearly overweight, but still those are aren't have a leg up.
But I don't really understand why people think it's disadvantageous if others can find out whether or not you were cute when you were two years old. I think it has more to do with fear of what's new than any logical argument.
Putting my money where my mouth is, here is my son:
http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7402/9525304181_8da5d48e22_b.j...
In what future dystopia will the presence of this photo on the public internet harm him? "Ooh, I see here that you once looked at the ocean as a child. You're fired."
Less trivial stuff (like having acne) has been used to deny people coverage when they've been diagnosed with cancer.
This is just of the top off my head, which is the point: We simply don't _know_ what might happen in the future. Most probably (and hopefully) not much, put we don't know.
And in fact, if a kid doesn't have some meat on their bones, that's a reason for concern.
[Edit: To make it clear, I haven't even looked at the picture previously posted, I was providing an unrelated example.]
Some examples: you child ends up in a viral video and millions of children all over the world and at his school mock it (e.g the Star Wars Kid, and lots of others). How will that affect his growing up?
Or your kid is not really popular at high school, and some other kids dig up a naked baby pic of his. Nothing special, they just circulate it all around school and make fun of him, and he feels like slicing his wrists or something.
Or the kid posts itself something foolish at 16, which makes him unemployable from every employee that would search for him online.
The Star Wars Kid video is not a good counter-example, because it was never intentionally posted online by its creator -- it was found (on a videotape) by other people and posted, and those people knew they were posting it to make fun of it.
> Or your kid is not really popular at high school, and some other kids dig up a naked baby pic of his. Nothing special, they just circulate it all around school and make fun of him, and he feels like slicing his wrists or something.
Firstly, we're not necessarily talking about naked baby pics. The original article is about never posting any photo of their kid online.
Secondly, the kind of bullying you describe presupposes several much bigger problems that are the responsibility of the parent, and it is the behavior of parents that we're discussing.
You're looking at this from the perspective of a bullied kid who just wishes it was easier to hide. But if your kid is so emotionally fragile that having other kids laugh at innocuous baby pictures is enough to make him suicidal, you did a shitty job as a parent.
Lots of parents do, in fact, raise emotionally damaged children who are vulnerable to bullying. But it's not their photo-posting habits that really matters.
>Or you know, those that aren't will have it as an advantage.
1: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/data_mine_1/2013/07...
Mix that 'good advice' with the 'quantified self' band-wagon that rolled through and it doesn't seem too crazy for a journalist to have taken up that torch -- at least long enough for an article or three.
To have continued well after it became clear that their child was properly growing/healthy -- and other article subjects presented themselves -- would be something different though.
You might never use facebook but you're on there. All of us are. Because your friends don't give a damn about privacy and screwed the pooch.
And Zuck knows. That's why he said on stage we'll all eventually have a profile, with his weird all-knowing nerd giggle (youtube 'zuckerburgs 10 evil seconds'), because even a ghost profile is still a profile, it's got data. It's verified. And you'll never delete it. Ever.
This ain't going back in.
It is a bit challenging to fully control some aspects of information about you, but it's disheartening to see the attitude (especially among geeks and techies) that "well, gosh, there's nothing you can do about it, so let's jump right in!".
Oh god, these types of smug parents annoy the crap out of me. This is the digital version of the mom who lectures you for letting your kid watch Sesame Street or eats Frosted Flakes, because don't you know sugar/TV are going to destroy his mind and body.
Kids grow up in their own world, not ours. The idea of checking domain names and Instagram account names before choosing the child's name is hilarious to me. Like domain names and Instagram are going to matter to teenagers 16 years from now.
Instagram? Who's to say - but my hunch is you're right.
We purchased a few name related domain names for our firstborn - if they're useless or unwanted, so it goes, but the downside risk seemed minor enough that I decided to go for it. I mean, when you compare it with all the other kid gear that gets used for 2-12 months before it's outgrown, domain names are a cheap extravagance. (Even when considering the holding cost)
We can see grade school and high school pictures of famous celebrities because pictures were taken with analog film cameras once. We can see old baby pictures of people who are 65 years old today because photography has existed for over a century.
Maybe you're not taking pictures of your daughter, but someone else will, and they can tag her with metadata for their own purposes.
I don't post my kids pictures publicly (I do to close friends), not for hyperbolic fears that someone might profile them and show them a targeted ad (The Horrors!), but because honesty, I've seen enough weirdos doing stuff with people's pictures online that I don't want them showing up on some jackass's website, especially ones people fap off to. Especially true for young girls, as there are people who steal portraits from other sites and they end up in spammy popup ads or worse.
But even that is a losing battle, as again, photos are taken everywhere by everyone. As the cost of cameras goes to zero, they will be omnipresent, and as networking becomes more and more ubiquitous, a world where you are always being filmed and classified is inevitable. It won't even require centralized governments or corporations to scale, just ordinary people filming decentralized.
The article didn't mention anything about not taking photos, it was simply about not sharing them publicly in any fashion. That's pretty much how it has been until the past few years--most photos were kept private.
Even without face recognition, disparate 'anonymous' accounts on different sites can be linked to her, as long as a few associates can be linked to real-world people [1].
[1] http://www.academia.edu/1518346/Link_Prediction_in_Highly_Fr...
> The process started in earnest as we were selecting her name. We’d narrowed the list down to a few alternatives and ran each (and their variants) through domain and keyword searches to see what was available. Next, we crawled through Google to see what content had been posted with those name combinations, and we also looked to see if a Gmail address was open.
Wait, what? Surely calling your daughter "Jane Doe" would be best, because then you could claim "Oh no, that's not me!" when presented with articles about drunken rampages or whatever. It'd be hard to find out if you were Jane_Doe_9297376 or Jane_Doe_91919229191.
For some reason I feel sorry for the child named with a pleasing combination of name and TLD.
Kids are not some kind of machine or algorithm that you can program in certain way. Seriously, what's wrong with some parents. Teach your kids the value of privacy by taking a balanced approach and not doing crazy things like reserving domain names and what not. Just because you are not posting anything online does not mean there is no trail. There always is and who knows what the digital world will be like in 20 years.
While the author of this article seems to take things to a certain extreme, I think this is a legitimate concern for parents today. Being a new parent, I consider my wife and I to be the average facebook "parent" users. We have a need to share pictures of our kid with close friends and family and since facebook most easily meets that need, my wife and I do post pictures of our kid there. We try to limit it to things we think would not be too embarrassing for him when he looks back them years from now.
It's hard however to know how he is going to react to them 10-20 years from now, let alone any impact it may have on his identity as he gets older. For now, sharing on Facebook, seems like the best alternative to email since its so easy to post and get feedback. I've looked at other alternatives (23snaps, kidfolio) but they all require re-creating my network from scratch which has been a non-starter for me. I think we're lacking a more private, secure alternative to Facebook that still makes sharing & commenting as easy as Facebook. And more importantly does not sell your data.
Finding a balance between privacy and ease of sharing is something parents are going to wrestle with from now on. And, In the event you trade in your privacy to Facebook, you don't even get a worthwhile service. Facebook albums aren't designed with children in mind -- they don't care about a child's growth, they makes no notes on a child's milestones.
I've started trying to solve this problem with some fellow parents. At the very least I hope we can give people one less thing to worry about. If you'd like to chat about the possibilities and challenges in this space or what my research has uncovered so far, please find me on Twitter: @conceptualitis
My name is Michael Roberts. Go ahead. Try to find out who I am from Google. I mean, sure, throw in my username here and you get my site since that was meant to be findable, but still - from my name alone, I'm effectively anonymous.
I’m not inclined to believe that this is an effective long game, either. A small fraction of these services are going to be relevant in five, ten, fifteen years. If my parents had tried the same thing before I was born (not long after web browsers were invented), they would have been worried about reserving BBS login names for me. I have to expect that the broad majority of people my age now don’t even know what a BBS is.
I haven't done the 'sign up for everything' piece, but my wife and I have made a conscious effort to minimize what we post about our daughter online. We don't refer to her by name, we don't tag her in photos, we minimize photos of her. Now, we both have active online lives, so we talk about her online, but hopefully in a respectful manner. Sometimes it is really hard to resist sharing that cute photo, simply because sites, FB in particular, make sharing so easy, but I think we've found a path that works for us.
I think a lot of parents, especially less privacy aware and/or tech savvy ones, are not aware of what they are doing for their kids when they post photos online. (Just as few non technical folks I have talked to know that the links at the top of Google search results are ads.) They just want to share information (mostly pictures) with friends and families.
I think it's cute people think social networks (in their current form) will still be around in 18 years. Technology will be in a place that probably very few of us can fathom at this current juncture. I like one of the users' comments on here that the act of registering all of these accounts for their child is akin to registering a geocities name back in the day. We all laugh at it now.
Like I said, the answer is somewhere in the middle. You don't have to do all or nothing. Just be judicious, as you would in your non-digital life (I would hope). Anything in excess can become problematic.
When my partner and I have a child some day, we'll probably be very careful about what we post online. It won't be excessive, but we won't be hermits either as unexisting can be just as odd/problematic as superexisting.
Amazing how important some people believe themselves and their little angels to be. If my 3 month old daughter grows up to be significant enough that my bathtub picture of her somehow has impact on her future then I hope to have raised her well enough to recognize the humor in that situation.
The old "you wouldn't understand if you aren't a yourself parent" line really is tiresome.
Resistance is futile.
I have a young child, it's normal for most people to ask my permission before putting photos of him on facebook. Generally, the people who live their lives on facebook over-sharing everything don't tend to ask, though I don't know too many people like that..
I'm curious to see how people introduce the Internet to their children in a relatively-responsible way.
Shutting kids up with technology and letting it take care of their upbringing is nothing new.
His main interaction thusfar has been chatting with people in Minecraft and on Steam, which concerns me only over the language.
None of these things existed 11 years ago, and I expect there will be a new set of things 11 years hence.
Her use is (casually) monitored in case any issues do pop up, though I consider this unlikely for a few years as she's only into Disney-style apps and a handful of toy unboxing subscriptions on YouTube. I've not noticed any opportunities for offensive or inappropriate content coming up so far, although this could change when she can spell and type! :-)
Has she found the egg videos yet?
I set up a delegated Gmail account for my son so that I can monitor and rescue the account. He uses Steam for online gaming (mostly gmod), and Facebook.
My daughter's iPhone is set up with my Apple ID, but her Gmail address is used for iMessage, Facetime, etc. Aside from the ability to use 'Find my iPhone' to locate her if necessary, I can also lock the iPhone remotely when I get a RenWeb alert that she didn't turn in her homework!
You should totally productize this.
2. Facebook might not be around by the time she is a teen