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Facebook wants you before you are born
- killnine 15y agoCreepy, but brilliant. I'm imagining what it would be like to be born into this world already having a facebook account, to already have begun being tracked, to already have a web presence. Your parents would manage the account until you came of certain age, then a present on your birthday could be control of your facebook account...
- kibwen 15y agoA legitimately terrifying prospect. Then again, imagine how comprehensive your Facebook timeline would be!
- WiseWeasel 15y agoI imagine there would be a permanent record of baby photos of you floating in the ether... the horror... forget about ever working in politics (would you want to be governed by someone who can't even keep their lunch down?). Then, once you're old enough, you could delete your FB account like a big girl, or maybe instead use the fact that your parents signed you up as a convenient excuse to now spend every waking minute of your tween life using that site as payback.
- Tichy 15y agoA lot of people grow up with baby photos all over the place. While we try to avoid it with our son, I just had to think: I am pretty sure the opposition of a political candidate would be capable of finding your baby photos no matter what (like getting them from a friend of the family or whatever).
- WiseWeasel 15y agoSorry, that was an attempt at humor on my part. I don't think having your baby photos out would be a serious concern, unless maybe your parents dressed you as baby hitler.
- ben1040 15y agoAnd then you hit your teen/tween years and push back against everything your parents gave you or stand for, including that Facebook account.
- herval 15y agonot everything is pushed back by teenagers. Cars, internet, cell phones - people tend to refute the ideologies of their parents (as well as the clothing style, it seems)... but items of consumerism tend to "pass from generation to generation" :-)
- ittan 15y agoBig brother!
- sharth 15y agoYou are not able to set your relationship status with someone as expected child. The image he references is not an accurate representation of facebook today.
- h2s 15y agoYep, I just looked and I can't see this either. It's not true.
- icebraining 15y agoBig sites, and FB in particular, are known to roll-out new features to limited groups before expanding them to everyone. It may be fake, but the fact that it doesn't appear in your profile doesn't prove that.
- quesera 15y agoSounds unlikely. How would that reconcile with their minimum age requirement? 13 years for COPPA compliance, as I understand it -- though I only think about it when danah boyd brings it up.
- icebraining 15y agoCOPPA only matters if it's the child the one giving personal information, and even then, it's legal as long as the parents/legal guardian consent. Pretty sure unborn children won't be giving out personal information themselves ;)
- Tichy 15y agoOf course you should secure a Facebook vanity URL for your unborn child.
- flyt 15y agoFacebook is a digital representation of people's real-world friend connections and social graph. It only makes sense to include people's children in that graph, as they're usually a pretty important part of people's lives.
- jasondrowley 15y agoFacebook has apparently allowed married couples to announce expected children for over a year now. http://mashable.com/2011/08/01/facebook-expecting-option/ http://mashable.com/2011/08/01/facebook-expecting-option/
- read_wharf 15y agoFace book has allowed ... The mind wobbles.
- read_wharf 15y agoI know I'm not the only one - I bought a few domains on variations of my son's name, which I'll give to him when he turns 18, or earlier if he wants them.