Are your kids online? Should they be?
Flagrant Disregard | August 4
As a father, photographer, and blogger I’ve often considered the important issue of online privacy for myself and my family. I’m not concerned with any of the crazy kidnap/murder/stalking scenarios that the media likes to play up. Just, in general, I think people should be able to control what personal information about them gets onto the internet. So I don’t “overshare” on my blog. And every picture I post on Flickr is approved by the subject first (Even my kids. I acknowledge they aren’t entirely competent, yet they’ve each vetoed me on more than one occasion). Importantly, I have never posted the real name of anyone in my family.
That last bit is one of the most systematic privacy guards I’ve employed. The idea is that, even if you know them, when you search for my kids’ names you won’t find anything. I don’t use them in tags, I don’t put them in blog posts—and I ask people who photograph my family to do the same. Granted, my name is all over the place and I do talk about my family so it’s not hard to put together—it’s a balancing act.
I don’t do this out of fear (although I do worry for kids entering high school with embarrassing baby photos online cross-referenced with their real names). I just feel that, if my son or daughter want to start building an online identity at some point, I don’t want them to be burdened by years of my baggage. And trust me, if your kids are in search engines now they probably always will be. Mine aren’t old enough to make the decision yet so, effectively, I’ve opted them out.
But I wonder if it makes any difference in the long run? A recent development has got me rethinking my strategy. Namely, face recognition in public search engines. Google image search and a new service called facesaerch.com [sic] both can do a kind of image search on faces. It’s conceivable that in the next few years anyone will be able to view a photo of someone online and then ask the search engine to show you every other picture of that same person. It’s even conceivable that the search would be able to take aging into account and to cross-reference it with other textual information. So if you spot a random photo of someone you recognize it would be one-click easy to find every other embarrassing photo/blog post of that same person regardless of where it is or when it was posted.
The best protection is not posting anything at all. But, in moderation and with care and respect, I still think it’s okay to write about and post photos of your kids online. But what do you think?
Do you write about/post photos of your kids online? Why or why not?
