A Stolen Video of My Daughter Went Viral | Hacker News Reader

A Stolen Video of My Daughter Went Viral

parenting.blogs.nytimes.com

26 pointstoddsiegel52 comments

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Children suffer enough "abuse" in our society, even without the bad effects of the Internet or technology in general.

They don't choose their names. They don't choose their religion. They don't choose their political views. For fuck's sake at least let them grow up to the point that they can choose for themselves if they want to share content of themselves with the entire world.

> I have always known, of course, that the mere act of uploading a video to any digital site means potentially losing control over that content. But now it had happened, and even though the shares appeared to be harmless — approving, even — it was still terrifying. What if someone decided to do something creepy with it?

Blows my mind that it took a video being stolen to get the author thinking about someone doing something creepy with her publicly-available videos. Does the pursuit of Likes really destroy her ability to think a few steps down the road?

While I agree with both the general premise and the specific plea, I am not aware of many societies where children choose their names, or their religions (though at least those, like their political views, don't figure prominently in most childhoods).

I've only seen such societies in documentaries(e.g. some distant(to me) native tribe etc)

And while we're at it, naming has a sound logic behind it. After all you have to refer to that person :)

But even so, there are some (not so exceptional) cases where naming could become a form of borderline abuse. In greek, almost all names mean something. Either the names are words derrived from a specific notion, or they are combined to produce a new one.

Imagine what fun this is, when the parents are derranged and the child is constantly bullied(for his name) from pre-school years through high-school and beyond.

EDIT: syntax/typo

religion features prominently in many childhoods.

> let them grow up to the point that they can choose for themselves

Do you have any advice on what to do when eleven year olds want to get Instagram and Facebook accounts by themselves?

Yes. Worst case scenario let them upload pictures of their cats, hamsters, etc but forbid them from uploading pictures of themselves.

If you're met with frustration and anger explain to them, with real world examples, the perils of sharing personal information with the rest of the world and why some things need to be private. If this fails, tell them, that when they reach the voting age, they can diregard everything you say, toss your rules down the bin and do as they please.

Not the OP, but my advice is never to reveal their ages when online.

Don't post pictures and videos of your children on the Internet. Simple.

I share pictures and videos of my kids on Facebook so that my technology-averse mother can see her grandkids. It has been very difficult to get her to use any social media at all. A password protected site, where there is no push to her tablet is a non-starter. For better or worse, Facebook is the lowest common denominator now, and as much as I dislike using it, it's become the standard. I currently see no better alternatives that my fairly large extended family and circle of friends can adopt easily.

So yeah, if you want to keep your pictures private, keep them private. If you want your family/friends to see them there are very few alternatives.

Edit: Apple's PhotoStream oddly enough is a close second contender. It's mobile-centric which is great, supports albums, allows multiple people to share pictures, and pushes notifications. The downside is obvious: Apple-only hardware. At least some people who normally would want these pictures/videos cannot get them this way. There is a web link you can set up, but then there is no push to phone, which sucks.

> If you want your family/friends to see them there are very few alternatives.

Email? Not even joking.

E-mail, text message, Skype, and even snail mail are all viable alternatives.

E-mail: Can't do it. My mother-in-law has an inbox that has thousands of unread messages. It'd just get lost in there. It's good for one-off pictures, but I need something with a concept of albums, tagging, searching, review later, etc. Oh, and it has to be easily accessible from a phone in just a few clicks to "show co-workers", etc.

SMS/MMS: my mother is on a phone plan that is very expensive MMS-wise.

Skype: same as email: no concept of albums, etc.

Snail mail: too strong and too expensive. I am not about to mail thousands of pictures or even flash drives to 2-3 dozen relatives.

Edit: Re: email, I also share lots of pictures. I mean, DSLR-dumps of multiple hundreds per week. Email limits won't allow me to share this many pictures.

E-mail- Not really. You get a luddite on email and then they fall for a phishing scam or get the computer so infected with mal-ware that it becomes unusable

Text message- Can't share video easily

Skype- Can't share the moment earlier in the day when the little one said that innocent cute thing

Snail mail- The best thing you could do is set up an 'if-this-then-that' procedure where it prints any picture taken from your mobile but again no video.

As much as I hate to see computers pushed into the 'appliance' market it does make sense for some.

>E-mail- Not really. You get a luddite on email and then they fall for a phishing scam or get the computer so infected with mal-ware that it becomes unusable

Ridiculous, basically everyone uses email

Skype includes file sharing. https://support.skype.com/en/faq/FA3091/how-do-i-send-and-re...

Not for video unless you reencode

Not for videos above a certain size I suppose. But then you could always upload to dropbox and email a link -- I think dropbox even includes support for link expirations (let family view/download it for 1 month), and password protected links?

note: not a dropbox user.

How about Dropbox (edit: or anything like dropbox)? Set them up with their own free account and share a folder with them from your account. Put photos and videos there. They'll sync automatically, and you can access them from a tablet too. https://www.dropbox.com/features/photos

Getting people to understand folder hierarchies can be difficult. There is tremendous value in 'click this, get fed new content'

You can make a URL shortcut right on the homescreen. iPhone http://lifehacker.com/5809338/add-web-site-bookmarks-to-your... and Android http://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-add-chrome-for-android-boo...

Dropbox is for file sharing, not photo sharing. I need something that says "Hey mom, Igor just uploaded 10 new pictures!"

Exactly - even if you have Facebook "share" settings, they can get reset (at random by Facebook). The best way to win is simply not to play.

I share on the internet with family but that's through password protected Smugmug event pages, and PhotoStream shared with private family members. Yes, this is a calculated risk, but I trust the above to take my privacy more seriously. I still don't share anything but selected photos.

Youtube, Facebook, even Google+/Picasa just seem too built to "share publicly".

I run an Owncloud instance on my own server for sharing photos and video with remote family members. Even then, I end up loading a USB stick every six months and posting it (parents in rural Australia and sluggish Internet).

You're right, it's a calculated risk, but posting photos of small children to Facebook, YouTube or any of the big public sites just strikes me as a bit thoughtless.

"even if you have Facebook "share" settings, they can get reset (at random by Facebook)"

Never saw this happen, and you can check/recheck it, or change it after.

Recently Facebook changed the default sharing settings to make them less public. http://www.siliconbeat.com/2014/05/22/facebook-changes-its-p...

There's this [1] - and how would you know to change it. Then there's other cases where their API had bugs that made your private information publicly available for 3rd parties [2].

The reality is that once you upload your private data to Facebook, you are at Facebook's mercy in terms of keeping that data private. They have made a lot of improvements, but essentially you have to trust them to protect you.

[1] http://www.wired.com/2009/12/facebook-privacy-update/ [2] http://www.theverge.com/2011/05/10/facebook-apps-leak-person...

That's good advice as far as maintaining privacy and safety of children are concerned. but it's completely unresponsive to the question of why it's so easy to just copy and slap a new title on someone else's content in pursuit of easy cash, which could just as easily happened with an amusing cat video or whatever. Are you saying that one you put something up in on a public site like youTube or Facebook, it's OK for other people to rip it off?

Not that it's OK, but that there's not much you can do about it. And with non-existent consequences, people will do it.

Edit: it's easy to commit lots of crimes, but it's more difficult to get away with almost anything compared to copyright infringement or violation of privacy rights. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_release

But Youttube could do a lot about it. Even after you strip away the metadata, the video is the same - sampling random frames to produce a 'signature' for each video or embedding an identifying but invisible 'watermark' as part of the upload process presents no technical barrier for them. When someone copies an existing video on YT, links to that could just automatically redirect to the original material (along with the click revenue, if ads were enabled).

ContentID already does this, you just have to sign up for it and register your videos. That's not to say it's trivial at Youtube's scale. ContentID was scanning 100 years of video every day back in 2012 http://www.jeffbullas.com/2012/05/23/35-mind-numbing-youtube... It's probably a lot higher now. One hour of video was uploaded per second (more now) and that has to be checked against hundreds of millions of videos in the ContentID database. ContentID doesn't redirect videos, but it gives you the option of taking ad revenue from them or deleting them.

I don't think our society has answered that yet. It's a relatively new phenomenon in our society and culture. Sharing/Pirating music and videos is so rampant, and it doesn't really "feel" wrong to those who do it, as if anything in digital media should be free to all.

And when the government tries to address this, the public pushes back (SOPA, etc). So, is it OK? Maybe...

The "thing the author learned" that I came away with was "people can steal things on the internet". The author's main point in the article was that she was not able to use the fame of her video (now re-posted) to advocate for her cause / take credit.

This is certainly a problem and YouTube should take action, but I fail to see why that would lead one to suddenly remove items from YouTube / Facebook for PRIVACY reasons.

This is an article on failed marketing, not to be confused with the privacy of her child - it's clear she doesn't care about that because she left the video public on purpose on YouTube, and has written an article for the New York Times.

Title should be changed to "Video pulled from mom's Youtube account uploaded to different Youtube account goes viral"

Things that you have posted on youtube with the intention that people download them cannot be stolen.

Not true. In such a case, stealing is defined as taking credit for something you didn't create. It's the same with open-source -- people are happy to give their code away, but only so long as their name and copyright credit remains attached to it.

You just defined stealing that way, though. It's a very slight but very significant change to go from 'stealing the credit for something' to 'stealing something.'

It's the same with open-source: a copyright violation.

It is sad to see even nytimes editors allowing such clickbaiting

If they thought about it, they may have come to the conclusion that it was newsworthy enough to outweigh the fact that it's obvious clickbait.

If I were a parent I would want to read it, and had it not been published, I might have thought that choice unfair to parents who might be in a similar position.

You know, growing up, witnessing, and enjoying the facebook/myspace/friendster effect, I feel like I am able to understand the context of this social atmosphere better than most people.

I enjoyed the rise of Facebook while I was in college and had a business that I was growing on campus while I was there. I became a hero to the students around my school for whatever work my business was doing. Facebook facilitated that. In the end, my exposure to mini-celebrity status made me realize that Facebook is exposing everybody to a (mini)celebrity experience.

Some people can handle it. Some are lucky enough to adjust to it. Most cannot handle it. And that goes for both mini and professional celebrities. They all fail and succeed.

The social media world has transformed since then to a significant level beyond comprehension. Superficial and artificial rules people made on a whim now plague parenting and educational sites. The current rules and guidelines don't seem to fit.

Overall, I believe Facebook is now lifting everyone to the celebrity experience. And the rules/guidelines that apply to celebrities now apply to all Facebookers.

This is the content ID problem we are trying to solve with Mine: http://www.minefile.info. We want to allow consumers to be able to discover original creators regardless of where content is consumed or reused using perceptual hashing and the blockchain.

A must-read -- a very sad story of a well-intentioned, highly principled parent, colliding with the modern Internet.

I generally save "very sad" for when someone, you know, dies or something.

I mean, if she really cared, she could have the content removed entirely. Rather than say, caring enough about getting credit by having the formerly anonymous child be linked to her blog.

I came onto this thread to make this exactly comment. This particular paragraph ruined the entire article for me:

Swamped with social media messages, “The View” responded appropriately and quickly. They removed the pirated video from their social media and re-shared the original video that had been created and uploaded by me.

I'm sure you've heard the saying that one death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is a statistic. In this case, even though no one died, someone's perception of reality was mortally wounded, and each reader of the article might have his or her grasp of reality materially changed.

On the general topic, in the calculus of human suffering, how many small insults equals a death? How many dashed ideals equals a tragedy? This isn't meant to either disparage or inflate human suffering or try to mathematize human experience, only to ask what tools we use to quantify the human condition.

You almost wrote a whole essay without even addressing his main point.

In fairness, when I replied to the parent comment it was much shorter than it is now and worded differently.

Fair enough. Didn't notice that. HN sucks for not storing the history :(

To be honest, I read your comment as sarcastic.

In an article about a video inspired by the recent shooting of two unarmed black men, you're going with the inconvenience of an adorable video going viral as the "very sad" part?

Principled my ass. And I am not sorry about the parent, I am sorry about the child who has such a stupid parent.

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