21 ms·

We Post Nothing About Our Daughter Online

120 points by mashmac2 13y ago

mashmac2 13y ago
Does anyone else do this (or something similar)? I'm curious to see how people introduce the Internet to their children in a relatively-responsible way.
- TausAmmer 13y ago
  I gave my child a macbook without parental control in age of 3.
  - coldtea 13y ago
    Well, tons of parents give their children unsupervised television watching for hours every day. Shutting kids up with technology and letting it take care of their upbringing is nothing new.
    - TausAmmer 13y ago
      Beauty in this case was that she did not felt restricted with computer time, and she can do other things, and go back to computer whenever she wants. 1 hour computer time creates way more problems that solves.
- debacle 13y ago
  My son (9) has a Minecraft account, a Steam account, and an email address which he doesn't know the password to (because he wouldn't remember it). His main interaction thusfar has been chatting with people in Minecraft and on Steam, which concerns me only over the language.
  - dgabriel 13y ago
    Mine, too (he's 11). He's also got an XBox live account for Portal 2, a youtube / gmail (mostly for videos about Minecraft and Kerbal Space Program), and an account here: http://scratch.mit.edu/ http://scratch.mit.edu/ . None of these things existed 11 years ago, and I expect there will be a new set of things 11 years hence.
- petercooper 13y ago
  My 3 year old daughter has been actively using an iPad in some form or another since around a year old. I don't plan on censoring or controlling her access but would review this based on changing circumstances. 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! :-)
  - milsorgen 13y ago
    > she's only into Disney-style apps and a handful of toy unboxing subscriptions on YouTube Has she found the egg videos yet?
    - petercooper 13y ago
      Haha, yes, that's the first thing she got into and she still watches them. Mostly http://www.youtube.com/user/FluffyJetProductions http://www.youtube.com/user/FluffyJetProductions who is quite entertaining. This has now fuelled a rather expensive Kinder Egg habit..
- mgcross 13y ago
  I'd suggest delegated Gmail accounts: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/12/email-delegation-granting-access-to.html http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/12/email-delegation-grant... used as contact emails for social networks. 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!
  - glitch003 13y ago
    > 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.
- justinhj 13y ago
  I post a lot of family pictures online but I never post anything that I'd consider embarrassing for my children. Nor do I post anything on Facebook that I wouldn't want a random stranger to overhear in a shopping line.
mbateman 13y ago
> We turned to KnowEm.com, a website I often rely on to search for usernames, even though the site is primarily intended as a brand registration service. We certainly had a front-runner for her name, but we would have chosen something different if the KnowEm results produced limited availability or if we found negative content associated with our selection. > 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?
- WalterSear 13y ago
  On the other hand, it's never too early to start helicopter parenting.
  - snowwrestler 13y ago
    Exactly. This article is a great compliment to the discussion yesterday about how society is increasingly risk-averse. This seems like a crazy amount of parental effort to resist what will seem like totally banal cultural norms to their daughter.
- hablahaha 13y ago
  Fast forward twenty years on her Github account - I think I would get an odd impression of her if I saw "Joined on [the day she was born]". Same goes for any site that prominently displays the sign up date as a badge of honor...
uptown 13y ago
So they're not posting anything about her online, but she's got more social-media accounts than the average American? How does proclaiming her existence to the digital world's user lists protect her from "facial recognition, Facebook profiling, and corporate data mining"? Like any human - when she reaches the age where these things become relevant, she'll either use the ones these companies have known about for a decade, or she'll create her own account that Mom & Dad aren't monitoring.
mooreds 13y ago
What a great idea! 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.
michaelfeathers 13y ago
People talk about stealth candidates in politics. I suspect that phrase will take on new meaning in the future. We'll have candidates whose histories will have been protected from public knowledge in this way.
- greenyoda 13y ago
  Or maybe even candidates who have meticulously constructed fake histories for themselves from a young age.
billybob255 13y ago
Just to add some context, the author also wrote a quantified self article about documenting every thing her daughter did [1] (time, food taken, diaper wetness, color of urine, thickness of poop, sleep habits, etc). These are not your standard parents. 1: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/data_mine_1/2013/07/data_driven_parenting_tracking_baby_sleep_eating_and_pooping_on_spreadsheets.html http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/data_mine_1/2013/07...
- roc 13y ago
  To be fair, many 'new parent' classes urge people to record a good bit of that information, in the event that the child is having trouble gaining weight, has an illness, etc. 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.
rayiner 13y ago
I'm a new parent and my wife and I are not taking any measures to minimize our kid's Facebook exposure. 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.
- epoxyhockey 13y ago
  As a general rule, it's pretty safe to do "what everybody else is doing." 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.
  - coldtea 13y ago
    >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. 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.
    - epoxyhockey 13y ago
      Considering that hundreds of thousands still lost their houses 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.
DanBC 13y ago
Most sites close accounts if they're for someone under the age of X. (18, 13?) So, these accounts are really the parents accounts, just in the name of the daughter, right? > 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.
- reinmen 13y ago
  Don't you think changing your surname to "Doe" is kinda overkill?
kenjackson 13y ago
Admirable, but naive. Facial recognition of baby pics is useless for the most part. By the time their daughter is 18 she will have plenty of tagged pictures of herself. Cameras are already everywhere and their use is accelerating. Google Glasses like devices are coming. And your picture ID is already used for facial recognition.
ef4 13y ago
The author is wrong because she assumes social customs are immutable. They aren't. 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.
- Raphmedia 13y ago
  That's already a fact for teens.
- coldtea 13y ago
  >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. 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.
  - ef4 13y ago
    I'll grant that it's logically possible. 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.jpg 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."
    - vasilipupkin 13y ago
      I think the main issue is that the kids are not given any choice about appearing online when you post their pictures there. They should have at least some choice in the matter, it seems.
      - 13y ago
deleted 13y ago
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drdaeman 13y ago
> When we think she’s mature enough (an important distinction from her being technically old enough), we’ll hand her an envelope with her master password inside. 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.
- bsenftner 13y ago
  I imagine it being pretty funny and old fashioned thinking when she is presented with the envelope. "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.
- aroman 13y ago
  If I were the daughter I would do this. My identity is what I want it to be. My parents have their own view of me, the government has another, etc. 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>.
roc 13y ago
This seems incredibly odd to me. 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.
- randallu 13y ago
  I agree with you, but I suppose the point is to make it the child's decision to share or not when they become mature enough to make that choice. (Personally my wife and I have no information on our kids online, save a self-hosted blog with a password that only family know...).
  - narcissus 13y ago
    The point may also be to make sure that someone else doesn't make that decision for their child. That is to say, to make sure that some kid in their class doesn't decide to grab the name so that they can set up a fake profile for their daughter...
lotsofcows 13y ago
The services you sign up for are unlikely to exist in 10 years time let alone 20.
- justinhj 13y ago
  It's quite likely that the content itself may well be mirrored to an archive as has happened with geocities. It's likely that any truly embarrassing or interesting picture will be pretty much immortal online.
- acheron 13y ago
  Seriously. I have a two-year-old; I found myself wondering about how he would deal with Facebook, etc., until I realized that if he had been born in 1991 instead of 2011 I'd have been wondering how he'd deal with dial-up BBSs.
salmonellaeater 13y ago
This approach is doomed to failure. From the moment their daughter starts spending time with people outside her immediate family, she will start showing up in others' photos and her face will be linked to those people. Given that there's some unknown person who repeatedly shows up with certain people, the second her name leaks somewhere it will be easy to reveal her history. 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_Fractional_Data_Sets http://www.academia.edu/1518346/Link_Prediction_in_Highly_Fr...
brador 13y ago
It's not you who uploads the pics, it's your friends and family, then they tag the faces. Then fb steals your friends address book info using the facebook app/email connections and builds out a network and ghost profile just for you. 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.
- pilom 13y ago
  Can they create profiles for children under 13? Can I sue them if my 10 year old child has a ghost profile?
  - brador 13y ago
    How would you know?
- pstack 13y ago
  No, because I'm aware of when my photo is taken and I am not friends with people who would splash up photos of myself and neither would my family (who I don't even know if are on facebook or other social networks, because I don't have friends or family on social networks, because I can just call or email or visit them in real life). 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!".
LordHumungous 13y ago
> I adore Kate’s parents, and they’re raising her to be an amazing young woman. But they’re essentially robbing her of a digital adulthood that’s free of bias and presupposition. 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.
- subpixel 13y ago
  True. Also, her daughter is going to be plenty embarrassed by her mom's high-anxiety-parenting (including, but not limited to the poop-tracking) when these articles are dug up by her friends in middle school.
  - LordHumungous 13y ago
    Yeah. "We don't want any information about our kid online, that's why we are writing articles about her pooping habits on Slate."
tlrobinson 13y ago
I wonder if marketing your encrypted p2p social network to paranoid parents would be a good way to get users.
cromwellian 13y ago
You live life, you leave a trail, this hasn't changed in the digital world, only made more convenient. For your kids to live in the world of the future and interact with others, they will need an identity, it is unavoidable unless they want to live off-the-grid in bush country. 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.
- jonknee 13y ago
  > Maybe you're not taking pictures of your daughter, but someone else will, and they can tag her with metadata for their own purposes. 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.
R_Edward 13y ago
I did just about everything wrong by this author's lights--posted plenty of photos and updates, gave them their own e-mail and social media accounts, etc. It didn't even occur to me to weigh their poops or do any sort of qualitative analysis of their urine! Somehow... Somehow, I says, they managed to turn out all right.
PrashantPansare 13y ago
The key takeaway is to avoid creating any content on internet that can be used for any indexing / linking back for anyone apart from yourself. Of course I do not like the idea that facebook is scanning your pics/info and using that further up.
snowwrestler 13y ago
I think this is, digitally, fighting the last war. 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.
- incongruity 13y ago
  Domain names are about as close as you can get to infrastructure digital world - so, they may matter - but perhaps not. 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)
  - snowwrestler 13y ago
    I'd argue that domain names don't matter much right now, for people. How many teenagers have their own name as a domain? How many even want one? Heck, how many adults have or want one? Even with the .name TLD, I don't feel like it's ever really taken off. And there might be a ton of new TLDs in use 15 years from now.
fistofjohnwayne 13y ago
I think these are outsized reactions to the problems described. I also don't believe there aren't any photos of their child online. As a new parent I can't imagine not using the Internet to share updates with my family whether it's via tumblr or something less public like email or an Apple Photo Stream. Most of these services have facial recognition. 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
ryansan 13y ago
Provocative article, but as with many things, the answer lies somewhere in the middle. 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.
codegeek 13y ago
Sorry this article has everything wrong about it. Reading this article makes me feel bad for the daughter of the author. I mean seriously ? A classic example of bad parenting in my opinion. So you are not going to post anything online. great. What about offline ? What about living life ? Everything has a trail, everything. This online post by the author itself has a trail that can be tracked to their daughter if someone really wants to. 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.
hoopism 13y ago
This is dumb beyond belief. 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.
samgrover 13y ago
I'm not sure how they intend to police photos of their daughter as taken by cameras not under their control, or on accounts not under their control, or other information posted about her by friends and family. Given the technologies involved, it would not be terribly hard to infer the daughter's photographs and personal information (name, etc.) and connect the two. There's also the very real possibility that she may not be interested in their idea of her personality and identity by the time she's grown up.
- desas 13y ago
  You write articles about how you want your childs privacy to be respected and hope some of your friends pay attention. 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..
therandomguy 13y ago
1. The kid's face is going to change over time 2. Facebook might not be around by the time she is a teen
nihaar 13y ago
Disclaimer: I am working on a project in this space with the goal to give parents more control on how to share pictures of their baby (www.getbabydigest.com) 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.
enscr 13y ago
This article is written by a parent and being debated by pseudo-teenagers (~ 15-25 age group). Of course it'll be ripped apart just like my comment :) Who needs privacy until you are a parent yourself.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  There is something like twice as many people using HN who are older than 25 than there are younger than 25, if the most recent age poll is to be believed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6058598 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6058598 The old "you wouldn't understand if you aren't a yourself parent" line really is tiresome.
brunorsini 13y ago
Whatever happens to their daughter is going to happen to the entire world, pretty much, and thus is going to have to be addressed collectively by our future selves anyway. We just have to stand up to those who misuse the data in discriminatory ways, sure, but simply refusing to take part in the future of the collective human experience is hardly a real solution.
ape4 13y ago
Put the photos on your own domain and link to them from Facebook.
cgtyoder 13y ago
So glad my parents signed up for my own personal ARPANET node before I was born. (Unfortunately, they were only able to snag a class B address space.)
j2d3 13y ago
I don't post (much, though not nothing) about my son online, but for different reasons. The idea that you're going to realistically provide some kind of anonymity capability by not posting pics of your kid of FB is a fantasy. Facial recognition is going to be part of reality due to state, private, and personal facial recognition capabilities. At school, in public, at work, facial recognition technologies will track everyone - there will be no opting out and it won't matter what you did or didn't post on FB. Resistance is futile.
pmiller2 13y ago
I think it's great that the parents are at least putting some thought into protecting their daughter's privacy online, even including the choice of her name. My name is so dirt common that unless you know something else about me, there's no way you're going to be able to zero in on articles about me, and I like that. One of my brother's children is named after one of our great grandparents, OTOH, and I'm reasonably sure there's nobody in that age group with that name. (Probably nobody under 70, even.) I'm not sure how I feel about that.
smutticus 13y ago
So just stop using FB. Problem solved.
- MarkTee 13y ago
  Er, not really. Choosing not to actively use Facebook doesn't protect you from shadow profiles or the actions of people that you know.
  - smutticus 13y ago
    You are correct, sir. I was being snarky and you called me on it. Thanks. I genuinely appreciate it.
digitalsushi 13y ago
I know this is smarmy but, check out this screen shot with a google ad in the article: http://imgur.com/dB9cyeQ http://imgur.com/dB9cyeQ
Vivtek 13y ago
So if I'm reading this right, they don't post pictures, but they made sure her name was easily Googleable? 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.
teekert 13y ago
We also don't post any pictures of our kid online. But for the simple reason that I know that it would be mostly for my own ego, I feel immense pride and have to hold back the pictures/videos on my phone frequently. Who genuinely likes to see hundreds of pics of their friends kids? I wonder...
bestest 13y ago
are. you. fucking. serious. I think you're trolling, and we're victims of some sort of social reaction experiment.
joe5150 13y ago
The biggest problem with this I see (beyond the general creepiness of it and the huge impression I get that this is less about privacy and more about wanting to preemptively micromanage your kid’s potential future “brand”) is the futility of it. I’m lost as to how squatting handles and URLs and profile names and domains on a dozen internet services somehow protects someone’s identity or anonymity or would actually prevent them from being impersonated, which are the stated goals according to the article. 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.

120 points by mashmac2 13y ago

Does anyone else do this (or something similar)? I'm curious to see how people introduce the Internet to their children in a relatively-responsible way.

TausAmmer 13y ago
I gave my child a macbook without parental control in age of 3.
- coldtea 13y ago
  Well, tons of parents give their children unsupervised television watching for hours every day. Shutting kids up with technology and letting it take care of their upbringing is nothing new.
  - TausAmmer 13y ago
    Beauty in this case was that she did not felt restricted with computer time, and she can do other things, and go back to computer whenever she wants. 1 hour computer time creates way more problems that solves.
debacle 13y ago
My son (9) has a Minecraft account, a Steam account, and an email address which he doesn't know the password to (because he wouldn't remember it). His main interaction thusfar has been chatting with people in Minecraft and on Steam, which concerns me only over the language.
- dgabriel 13y ago
  Mine, too (he's 11). He's also got an XBox live account for Portal 2, a youtube / gmail (mostly for videos about Minecraft and Kerbal Space Program), and an account here: http://scratch.mit.edu/ http://scratch.mit.edu/ . None of these things existed 11 years ago, and I expect there will be a new set of things 11 years hence.
petercooper 13y ago
My 3 year old daughter has been actively using an iPad in some form or another since around a year old. I don't plan on censoring or controlling her access but would review this based on changing circumstances. 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! :-)
- milsorgen 13y ago
  > she's only into Disney-style apps and a handful of toy unboxing subscriptions on YouTube Has she found the egg videos yet?
  - petercooper 13y ago
    Haha, yes, that's the first thing she got into and she still watches them. Mostly http://www.youtube.com/user/FluffyJetProductions http://www.youtube.com/user/FluffyJetProductions who is quite entertaining. This has now fuelled a rather expensive Kinder Egg habit..
mgcross 13y ago
I'd suggest delegated Gmail accounts: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/12/email-delegation-granting-access-to.html http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/12/email-delegation-grant... used as contact emails for social networks. 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!
- glitch003 13y ago
  > 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.
justinhj 13y ago
I post a lot of family pictures online but I never post anything that I'd consider embarrassing for my children. Nor do I post anything on Facebook that I wouldn't want a random stranger to overhear in a shopping line.

mbateman 13y ago

> We turned to KnowEm.com, a website I often rely on to search for usernames, even though the site is primarily intended as a brand registration service. We certainly had a front-runner for her name, but we would have chosen something different if the KnowEm results produced limited availability or if we found negative content associated with our selection. > 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?

WalterSear 13y ago
On the other hand, it's never too early to start helicopter parenting.
- snowwrestler 13y ago
  Exactly. This article is a great compliment to the discussion yesterday about how society is increasingly risk-averse. This seems like a crazy amount of parental effort to resist what will seem like totally banal cultural norms to their daughter.
hablahaha 13y ago
Fast forward twenty years on her Github account - I think I would get an odd impression of her if I saw "Joined on [the day she was born]". Same goes for any site that prominently displays the sign up date as a badge of honor...

uptown 13y ago

So they're not posting anything about her online, but she's got more social-media accounts than the average American? How does proclaiming her existence to the digital world's user lists protect her from "facial recognition, Facebook profiling, and corporate data mining"? Like any human - when she reaches the age where these things become relevant, she'll either use the ones these companies have known about for a decade, or she'll create her own account that Mom & Dad aren't monitoring.

mooreds 13y ago

What a great idea! 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.

michaelfeathers 13y ago

People talk about stealth candidates in politics. I suspect that phrase will take on new meaning in the future. We'll have candidates whose histories will have been protected from public knowledge in this way.

greenyoda 13y ago
Or maybe even candidates who have meticulously constructed fake histories for themselves from a young age.

billybob255 13y ago

Just to add some context, the author also wrote a quantified self article about documenting every thing her daughter did [1] (time, food taken, diaper wetness, color of urine, thickness of poop, sleep habits, etc). These are not your standard parents. 1: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/data_mine_1/2013/07/data_driven_parenting_tracking_baby_sleep_eating_and_pooping_on_spreadsheets.html http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/data_mine_1/2013/07...

roc 13y ago
To be fair, many 'new parent' classes urge people to record a good bit of that information, in the event that the child is having trouble gaining weight, has an illness, etc. 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.

rayiner 13y ago

I'm a new parent and my wife and I are not taking any measures to minimize our kid's Facebook exposure. 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.

epoxyhockey 13y ago
As a general rule, it's pretty safe to do "what everybody else is doing." 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.
- coldtea 13y ago
  >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. 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.
  - epoxyhockey 13y ago
    Considering that hundreds of thousands still lost their houses 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.

DanBC 13y ago

Most sites close accounts if they're for someone under the age of X. (18, 13?) So, these accounts are really the parents accounts, just in the name of the daughter, right? > 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.

reinmen 13y ago
Don't you think changing your surname to "Doe" is kinda overkill?

kenjackson 13y ago

Admirable, but naive. Facial recognition of baby pics is useless for the most part. By the time their daughter is 18 she will have plenty of tagged pictures of herself. Cameras are already everywhere and their use is accelerating. Google Glasses like devices are coming. And your picture ID is already used for facial recognition.

ef4 13y ago

The author is wrong because she assumes social customs are immutable. They aren't. 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.

Raphmedia 13y ago
That's already a fact for teens.
coldtea 13y ago
>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. 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.
- ef4 13y ago
  I'll grant that it's logically possible. 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.jpg 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."
  - vasilipupkin 13y ago
    I think the main issue is that the kids are not given any choice about appearing online when you post their pictures there. They should have at least some choice in the matter, it seems.
    - 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

drdaeman 13y ago

> When we think she’s mature enough (an important distinction from her being technically old enough), we’ll hand her an envelope with her master password inside. 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.

bsenftner 13y ago
I imagine it being pretty funny and old fashioned thinking when she is presented with the envelope. "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.
aroman 13y ago
If I were the daughter I would do this. My identity is what I want it to be. My parents have their own view of me, the government has another, etc. 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>.

roc 13y ago

This seems incredibly odd to me. 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.

randallu 13y ago
I agree with you, but I suppose the point is to make it the child's decision to share or not when they become mature enough to make that choice. (Personally my wife and I have no information on our kids online, save a self-hosted blog with a password that only family know...).
- narcissus 13y ago
  The point may also be to make sure that someone else doesn't make that decision for their child. That is to say, to make sure that some kid in their class doesn't decide to grab the name so that they can set up a fake profile for their daughter...

lotsofcows 13y ago

The services you sign up for are unlikely to exist in 10 years time let alone 20.

justinhj 13y ago
It's quite likely that the content itself may well be mirrored to an archive as has happened with geocities. It's likely that any truly embarrassing or interesting picture will be pretty much immortal online.
acheron 13y ago
Seriously. I have a two-year-old; I found myself wondering about how he would deal with Facebook, etc., until I realized that if he had been born in 1991 instead of 2011 I'd have been wondering how he'd deal with dial-up BBSs.

salmonellaeater 13y ago

This approach is doomed to failure. From the moment their daughter starts spending time with people outside her immediate family, she will start showing up in others' photos and her face will be linked to those people. Given that there's some unknown person who repeatedly shows up with certain people, the second her name leaks somewhere it will be easy to reveal her history. 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_Fractional_Data_Sets http://www.academia.edu/1518346/Link_Prediction_in_Highly_Fr...

brador 13y ago

It's not you who uploads the pics, it's your friends and family, then they tag the faces. Then fb steals your friends address book info using the facebook app/email connections and builds out a network and ghost profile just for you. 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.

pilom 13y ago
Can they create profiles for children under 13? Can I sue them if my 10 year old child has a ghost profile?
- brador 13y ago
  How would you know?
pstack 13y ago
No, because I'm aware of when my photo is taken and I am not friends with people who would splash up photos of myself and neither would my family (who I don't even know if are on facebook or other social networks, because I don't have friends or family on social networks, because I can just call or email or visit them in real life). 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!".

LordHumungous 13y ago

> I adore Kate’s parents, and they’re raising her to be an amazing young woman. But they’re essentially robbing her of a digital adulthood that’s free of bias and presupposition. 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.

subpixel 13y ago
True. Also, her daughter is going to be plenty embarrassed by her mom's high-anxiety-parenting (including, but not limited to the poop-tracking) when these articles are dug up by her friends in middle school.
- LordHumungous 13y ago
  Yeah. "We don't want any information about our kid online, that's why we are writing articles about her pooping habits on Slate."

tlrobinson 13y ago

I wonder if marketing your encrypted p2p social network to paranoid parents would be a good way to get users.

cromwellian 13y ago

You live life, you leave a trail, this hasn't changed in the digital world, only made more convenient. For your kids to live in the world of the future and interact with others, they will need an identity, it is unavoidable unless they want to live off-the-grid in bush country. 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.

jonknee 13y ago
> Maybe you're not taking pictures of your daughter, but someone else will, and they can tag her with metadata for their own purposes. 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.

R_Edward 13y ago

I did just about everything wrong by this author's lights--posted plenty of photos and updates, gave them their own e-mail and social media accounts, etc. It didn't even occur to me to weigh their poops or do any sort of qualitative analysis of their urine! Somehow... Somehow, I says, they managed to turn out all right.

PrashantPansare 13y ago

The key takeaway is to avoid creating any content on internet that can be used for any indexing / linking back for anyone apart from yourself. Of course I do not like the idea that facebook is scanning your pics/info and using that further up.

snowwrestler 13y ago

I think this is, digitally, fighting the last war. 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.

incongruity 13y ago
Domain names are about as close as you can get to infrastructure digital world - so, they may matter - but perhaps not. 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)
- snowwrestler 13y ago
  I'd argue that domain names don't matter much right now, for people. How many teenagers have their own name as a domain? How many even want one? Heck, how many adults have or want one? Even with the .name TLD, I don't feel like it's ever really taken off. And there might be a ton of new TLDs in use 15 years from now.

fistofjohnwayne 13y ago

I think these are outsized reactions to the problems described. I also don't believe there aren't any photos of their child online. As a new parent I can't imagine not using the Internet to share updates with my family whether it's via tumblr or something less public like email or an Apple Photo Stream. Most of these services have facial recognition. 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

ryansan 13y ago

Provocative article, but as with many things, the answer lies somewhere in the middle. 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.

codegeek 13y ago

Sorry this article has everything wrong about it. Reading this article makes me feel bad for the daughter of the author. I mean seriously ? A classic example of bad parenting in my opinion. So you are not going to post anything online. great. What about offline ? What about living life ? Everything has a trail, everything. This online post by the author itself has a trail that can be tracked to their daughter if someone really wants to. 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.

hoopism 13y ago

This is dumb beyond belief. 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.

samgrover 13y ago

I'm not sure how they intend to police photos of their daughter as taken by cameras not under their control, or on accounts not under their control, or other information posted about her by friends and family. Given the technologies involved, it would not be terribly hard to infer the daughter's photographs and personal information (name, etc.) and connect the two. There's also the very real possibility that she may not be interested in their idea of her personality and identity by the time she's grown up.

desas 13y ago
You write articles about how you want your childs privacy to be respected and hope some of your friends pay attention. 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..

therandomguy 13y ago

1. The kid's face is going to change over time 2. Facebook might not be around by the time she is a teen

nihaar 13y ago

Disclaimer: I am working on a project in this space with the goal to give parents more control on how to share pictures of their baby (www.getbabydigest.com) 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.

enscr 13y ago

This article is written by a parent and being debated by pseudo-teenagers (~ 15-25 age group). Of course it'll be ripped apart just like my comment :) Who needs privacy until you are a parent yourself.

jlgreco 13y ago
There is something like twice as many people using HN who are older than 25 than there are younger than 25, if the most recent age poll is to be believed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6058598 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6058598 The old "you wouldn't understand if you aren't a yourself parent" line really is tiresome.

brunorsini 13y ago

Whatever happens to their daughter is going to happen to the entire world, pretty much, and thus is going to have to be addressed collectively by our future selves anyway. We just have to stand up to those who misuse the data in discriminatory ways, sure, but simply refusing to take part in the future of the collective human experience is hardly a real solution.

ape4 13y ago

Put the photos on your own domain and link to them from Facebook.

cgtyoder 13y ago

So glad my parents signed up for my own personal ARPANET node before I was born. (Unfortunately, they were only able to snag a class B address space.)

j2d3 13y ago

I don't post (much, though not nothing) about my son online, but for different reasons. The idea that you're going to realistically provide some kind of anonymity capability by not posting pics of your kid of FB is a fantasy. Facial recognition is going to be part of reality due to state, private, and personal facial recognition capabilities. At school, in public, at work, facial recognition technologies will track everyone - there will be no opting out and it won't matter what you did or didn't post on FB. Resistance is futile.

pmiller2 13y ago

I think it's great that the parents are at least putting some thought into protecting their daughter's privacy online, even including the choice of her name. My name is so dirt common that unless you know something else about me, there's no way you're going to be able to zero in on articles about me, and I like that. One of my brother's children is named after one of our great grandparents, OTOH, and I'm reasonably sure there's nobody in that age group with that name. (Probably nobody under 70, even.) I'm not sure how I feel about that.

smutticus 13y ago

So just stop using FB. Problem solved.

MarkTee 13y ago
Er, not really. Choosing not to actively use Facebook doesn't protect you from shadow profiles or the actions of people that you know.
- smutticus 13y ago
  You are correct, sir. I was being snarky and you called me on it. Thanks. I genuinely appreciate it.

digitalsushi 13y ago

I know this is smarmy but, check out this screen shot with a google ad in the article: http://imgur.com/dB9cyeQ http://imgur.com/dB9cyeQ

Vivtek 13y ago

So if I'm reading this right, they don't post pictures, but they made sure her name was easily Googleable? 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.

teekert 13y ago

We also don't post any pictures of our kid online. But for the simple reason that I know that it would be mostly for my own ego, I feel immense pride and have to hold back the pictures/videos on my phone frequently. Who genuinely likes to see hundreds of pics of their friends kids? I wonder...

bestest 13y ago

are. you. fucking. serious. I think you're trolling, and we're victims of some sort of social reaction experiment.

joe5150 13y ago

The biggest problem with this I see (beyond the general creepiness of it and the huge impression I get that this is less about privacy and more about wanting to preemptively micromanage your kid’s potential future “brand”) is the futility of it. I’m lost as to how squatting handles and URLs and profile names and domains on a dozen internet services somehow protects someone’s identity or anonymity or would actually prevent them from being impersonated, which are the stated goals according to the article. 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.