Removing my children from the Internet
ryan-mclaughlin.com
ryan-mclaughlin.com
There simply is no good reason to share such photos publicly/online. Show them to your friends on your phone if you really ahve to.
"Once uploaded, a picture stays forever". There are plenty of cases where embarrassing pictures went viral and destroyed whole lifes.
Kids will take any reason they can find to pick on somebody if they feel like picking on somebody. Anything that sets their victim apart from them.
They might pick on your kid exactly because there's no pictures of him on the web. They might infer from that that he's adopted, his parent's can afford computer, his parent beat him so badly as a child that they couldn't post his pictures because police would lock them up and so on.
You don't fight crime by second guessing criminals. You don't fight bullies by trying to imagine what excuse bullies would use to attack your kid. You just fight them as they show up.
> There are plenty of cases where embarrassing pictures went viral and destroyed whole lifes.
Same argument might be posed against anything that is even remotely fun or public or both. There are some people who gained massively from their pictures or videos going viral and overwhelming amount of people who gained or lost exactly nothing.
Then why add even more fuel to the fire?
>Same argument might be posed against anything that is even remotely fun or public or both. There are some people who gained massively from their pictures or videos going viral and overwhelming amount of people who gained or lost exactly nothing.
Yes, it was advantageous to some people that their video/s or picture/s went viral. But what does the chance of that happening have to do with people posting pictures of their half-naked kids? Would you want your kid to become a meme that gets posted everywhere? Of course there is the chance that things a kid does in public can be embarrassing, too, but again: what does that have to do with the chance that some picture or video that _your parents_ shared online starts to gain traction?
Oh and I'm 20 years old so I obviously don't have kids yet. I just know what it feels like to get bullied.
To find where the fire comes from and squash the source.
> But what does the chance of that happening have to do with people posting pictures of their half-naked kids? Would you want your kid to become a meme that gets posted everywhere?
I'd argue that chances of being significantly harmed are pretty much the same as being significantly enriched. Both extremely low.
It's good that people try to raise awareness about the fact that you can't control information you released. I just don't share the 'hide yo kids, hide yo wife' sentiment.
All that said, I personally share very little and don't really get why people post things on Facebook.
So, maybe that's the point the blogger is making. Hey, I didn't understand that positing on Facebook is the same thing like releasing to the public. Now, that I thought about it, no, I don't want to release my children pictures to the whole world for the whole of eternity. Sounds reasonable to me.
Child is born as a racist sadist and gradually becomes socialized as circuitry for empathy developes.
I have done some stuff as a kid I wish I haven't but I can't be embarrassed about it. I didn't have a properly developed brain back then. Being a kid is like having a condition. You can't hold yourself responsible for what your body did then.
But should I see a therapist to address my feelings about crying due to the results of a children's athletic competition? I guess I ultimately wouldn't care if my friends knew that one, but I can empathize with people that would feel super uncomfortable.
there was the time I proclaimed to not like Scots because of their participation in the Atlantic slave trade. I was 7 or 8, started reading a book on the subject without understanding the context.
The time I declared all diamonds "pubic zirconiums".
50 years ago it was "cute" to take pictures of kids in their your little KKK outfits. Somehow posting that on the net, with a real name, for eternity, might not be wise.
The point is kids say and do the darndest things. They rely on adults to be their filter and quite a few are doing a really poor job of it.
I wish I haven't said that because that was inaccurate (I hope there was not much harm done), but I can't say that I'm really embarrassed.
:)
Last week a friend of mine asked me, what I think about piercings, because his daughter (15) wants one. He was all, she's going to destroy her body and life and all.
There is a small but very vocal element in the UK who would be horrified by that, and who would call the police and child protection social services.
I know it's stupid, and that parents have photographs on their children in baths, but these people have caused some problems for parents wishing to take photographs. School sports days, school plays, your child playing at a playground or in the park - all of these have been made difficult places to take photographs at.
Luckily, it's less of a problem now than it was a few years ago.
The crux of the issue is that I'm not who I was. Baby chad_oliver was a different person.
You may never learn about the change and never know to opt-out until it is too late. The moving target is by design, not accident.
If you use facebook for anything other than a throwaway account, you are exposed.
Are you really comparing the private "Hey, you're going to marry. Want to see what little lnanek looked like when he was 4?" album with data on the net?
Not that I am against ANY sharing but sense and sensibility are both required.
(Edit grammery...)
Share things sensibly. Maybe don't share things like naked bath photos. But your kids are part of your life, and it's normal to share with others the things you have done with the people close to you.
For example I have total privacy. I have no photos from my early childhood. None. How do you think I feel when I know that all other people have some or lots? I feel like I haven't existed back then at all. Like I popped into existence at age 6 or something. Or that I was too ugly, or too plain to photograph.
How will a kid feel that has no published photos of her/him online? He might think that he was ugly or unremarkable and parents were just ashamed of her/him or that parents hoped he'll die so why introduce kid to the public or that they just hated her/him?
Keep them, just like parents for our generation did (I assume 79 is your year of birth) in a private place. If the kids want to have those later: Sure, these pictures are theirs to begin with.
Take pictures, if you want. Store them locally or .. print them out.
Your personal lack of pictures is a different thing and not connected to the point here - although I guess it helps understanding your 'pro sharing' comments.
If I have no photos, then none can be posted online - event better guarantee that they won't ever be posted online without my consent.
But you are not asking, rather saying that those are not the same thing. Yes. They are not. I used it as just an analogy. 10 years from now might be as weird to be kid with no early childhood photos online as today it is to be the kid with no photos at all.
IF in ten years everyone has pictures online and due to some weird shift of culture and perception that is normal, everyone else is weird: Let your kids post their pictures. When they're old enough to decide that for themselves.
That's why I argued that you certainly can have pictures of your kids and arguably should. For yourself and your mature/adult kids.
Posting all your own childhood photos might also be perceived as weird in the future (isn't it now?).
Personally I believe our children and grandchildren will live in much more transparent times. I think they should feel good with transparency and demand transparency. Hiding them from the world goes in exactly opposite direction.
Transparency is important - in public. The government, work, politics in general should be transparent. But using transparency as a reason to kill any notion of privacy (because that's what "not posting pictures of my kid" is about) is a strange point to make.
There's no reason at all for someone on the internet to ask about 'transparency' regarding the daily life of my family, my children. That'd be an utterly ridiculous demand to make. My sex life isn't 'transparent' in that way either.
I'm always up for that.
I'm not saying that private lives should be transparent. Only that they will be. Therefore I believe that kids comfortable with over-sharing will have easier lives, psychologically. I think we are one of the last generations that believe privacy to be natural state. I think our grandchildren will be absolutely devastated when they find out that because of some technical glitch there's no recording of the event they just experienced semi-privately.
One of them is about privacy, and there is a grey area. The other is exploiting children. Basically you're giving Facebook pictures of your kids as payment in return for a "free" service. People should be aware that when they do that it's not "sharing", it's selling.
Just as "the only winning move is to not play", the only way to ensure your information isn't on the internet (precluding hacks) is to not put it there in the first place.
Unfortunately that's not always possible. For example you're in a pub with your friends, and someone takes a group picture and posts it online. Even if you don't have FB account, you're there, and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. Very annoying.
You could have a chat with them and see if they're willing to respect your privacy. Nothing much that can be done about strangers who do that though.
I've seen a few places that actively ban Google Glass (I think that was mentioned here as well), but there are no bans on camera phones in any place as far as I know. If a thing exists, it will be used after all. Original intent be damned.
Making computer that forgets is like making more and more fantastic cars that run no faster than a horse because some people feel uncomfortable with them going faster.
I personally hate forgetting and I'd very much liked if I could call up, a computer system and recall every bit of my life. Everything I've seen, heard, and any data from any sensors that were in my vicinity.
See e.g. http://archive.org/web/web.php
it sucks that so many net-based businesses make privacy so hard.