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Imagine Googling Your Name and Finding Your Entire Childhood Online
There’s a certain breed of mommy bloggers that really, really get under my skin. It’s one thing to write about your experiences using your own frame of reference, but there are a number of women out there who write using their kids’ hardships and travails as fodder, exposing their personal lives (with pictures and names) to the world without their consent. One of the latter groups of mommy bloggers just wrote an exceptionally awful piece at the Washington Post that I wanted to highlight:
The day after Christmas, she hunkered down to explore her laptop. First stop: an Internet-wide search on my name. Second stop: a furious march to my room, where she thrust the shiny new device in my face.
“What’s all this?” she said. The screen was covered with thumbnail sketches of her as a baby, a toddler and preschooler — each paired with an essay or blog post I’d written on the subject of parenting. “Why are all of these pictures of me on the Internet?” She wanted to know, and she had a right to know.
You’re darn right she did. The Atlantic’s Taylor Lorenz channeled the daughter’s perspective, writing on Twitter,
https://twitter.com/TaylorLorenz/status/1081272269870153729
I’m an oversharer. I have a very active social media presence, which includes Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts (I’m bethanyshondark on all platforms). When my husband Seth and I were pregnant, we decided quite early on that while our chinchilla (RIP) might have a Tumblr blog, our kid(s) wouldn’t be nearly as overexposed. We developed a policy: we would never share their names, photos of their faces, any personal detail they might find embarrassing later on, or medical information outside of innocuous things like food allergies.
Part of why we developed the policy is because we’re somewhat public figures, and we didn’t want their lives to be defined by our public personas. Funny enough, Lorenz herself once doxxed the adult children of Pamela Geller, only validating our decision to shield their identities online. Because we’re public figures and the recipients of a great deal of online hate and the occasional death threat, we also decided not to post personal details about our kids for safety reasons.
But even if we weren’t public figures, I think we still would have taken this route. Seth and I are very different people regarding social media exposure. Once, when we were very newly married, I tweeted a picture of him reading my copy of People Magazine on a plane because he had forgotten his reading material in his checked luggage. When we landed and he saw the tweet, he was fairly irate. He thought it made him look stupid and unserious, and asked that I delete it. We then started a policy where I would ask before posting anything of or about him online; and outside of cute sleeping pictures of him with the kids on Instagram (faces not visible), that’s still our policy. His reaction was surprising; I never thought he would object to a picture of him reading a gossip magazine. But it made me realize how differently we feel about social media (he doesn’t have an Instagram or Facebook, and he only uses Twitter for work), and how our kids may feel more like him than me when they grow up.
There’s also the privacy concerns regarding Big Tech as well. Facebook records pictures and utilizes facial recognition software. They track what you say, even in groups, and one day your posts about your son’s constipation or your questions about your child’s overactive masturbation in a mommy group will be filed away somewhere for eternity. Could your posts about their chronic bedwetting or tonsilitis affect their health or life insurance premiums one day? The world looks very different today than it did twenty years ago, and it will look that much more different twenty years from now. We have no idea how this information is stored, or how it may be used against us in the future.
Weighing the costs and benefits of sharing my kids online, it seemed pretty much like a no-brainer that we’d limit what we put out there. When we see people in person, they see our kids’ faces, they learn their names, and get to know their personalities outside of the tiny snippets I post online. Very few people we don’t see on a regular basis care that they don’t see our kids or know much about them; let’s be real, we find our kids far more fascinating than the rest of the world does. We keep in touch with the folks who matter, and we have a shared photo stream on iPhoto family can access to see a few pictures a month; whenever we think to post something.
The world isn’t entitled to our kids; and more importantly, our kids are entitled to their privacy.
Published in Technology
I’m not going to say what I’d like because I’m hoping this goes public so I can share it with a couple of young mothers who really, really need to think about these things.
Will this lead to an worldwide epidemic of nightmares about being naked in public?
Christmas Eve we had a nativity pageant at Mass. Twenty-plus children, age four to eighteen years old, ( plus a four-day-old continously asleep Jesus) and two live lambs ( much bleating) acted. It was magical.
Our Priest’s assistant asked for pictures to be sent to put on the Parrish website. A mother objected to me, afterwards, for just this reason. That night I updated apps. Next day, IOS pictures was asking me to name the new faces in the photos I took. Yaaarrr.
I’ve never been on facebook or other social media. This is it! (Ricochet)
None of it is going online, we will provide cd’s for the parrishioners that want it.
Just wait until the children of the feminist bloggers who overtly hate them grow up… awkward…
Once its electronic, somebody will take it public.
For a little perspective, I turn to a story from Ogden Nash, the first (and perhaps the only) American to make his living from publishing poetry. Many of his poems chronicled the life of his young daughter. In her teenage years, Nash realized that she might come to resent having her life paraded in front of magazine readers. So he wrote the following poem.
Chuckles, you are right, of course. But at least it won’t be on an easy-to-find website, with no restrictions on access. Someone suggested a private Facebook something-or-other, which may or may not be worse than a cd.
Apple photo didn’t ask me to name the faces that I have many photos of already, just the new ones. That’s downright creepy.
I believe my children have the rights to their own lives, which is why I have adorned them with pseudonyms. They don’t mind the stories I tell (Marine used several posts about his journey to the Corps in an essay of his own) because there’s nothing there that can impact them in any way.
People have always been diarists. And exhibitionists. And proud parents. It’s when they mix all three that it becomes a problem.
My daughter grew up with a last name that often brought the same question: are you . . . ? She was. Whole different piscine-kettle than knowing Mommy blogged about your Pamper accident.
Excellent post, and I know a couple of young moms who need to read it as well.
Still, if the generation coming up can teach the generation or two that are currently in charge of the Internet a few things about boundaries and privacy, that’ll be a good thing, IMHO.
This little girl will be lucky if the photos of her appear only on the pages where her mother posted them, and if none of them have been co-opted for use by others elsewhere, for other purposes. (If they have, I hope it’s for benign purposes.) Because once something’s online, who knows where it will end up? We see that pretty clearly with photos of famous people (yes, public figures, but their children are not, or perhaps would rather not be)–a less-than-flattering, or candid, shot of one of the Obama girls, or Barron Trump, and suddenly, it’s re-posted, and re-tweeted everywhere. And the children are being mocked, made fun of, and used as pawns to score points for their parents’ detractors.
That sort of thing goes on at all levels, with the famous and not so famous, as parents of kids with unfortunate medical conditions have discovered, when they’ve posted photos of their children online, perhaps on a blog about their medical challenges, and then discovered that their “ugly” child photo has gone viral. Once something’s online, or even sent in electronic format anywhere, you’ve really lost all control of it. And Lord knows where it will end up.
That’s one problem. The other could be solved, or at least mitigated, this old granny thinks, if the young parents of today spent less time worrying about how they can secure permission from their eighteen-month old toddler before changing its diaper, and more time worrying about the amount of face time (not a registered trademark) they spend actually doing things with their children in a world that is not bounded by the very short distances between their fingertips, their computer screens and their eyeballs.
(Kidding, great post, and agreed.)
You did it right. Those of us who followed your stories of Daughter felt like friends of the family, not voyeurs.
My sister-in-law (not the one in Texas) is addicted to Facebook and social media. When my wife Janet was diagnosed with cancer and began treatment my sister-in-law started posting Every Detail of my wife’s condition. Which made my wife – a very private person – go ballistic. She called up my sister-in-law and told her to take down all the postings involving my wife and cancer, and never, ever post anything about it again. Oh yes, and by the way, if you post something about her or any of our sons (who were all adults then) contact them and get permission first.
My sister-in-law did, and only posted about Janet in a tribute after Janet died from cancer.
(Similarly, I never used Janet’s name on Ricochet until after she died. She was always Quilter. Since then? The dead lose their vote.)
Stop putting so much personal information on the Internet – especially pictures – especially of kids – the daughter was 100% right and if the mom has to shut down a part of herself as she put it (who is this really about), find another way.
It is a matter of parental priorities. Most good parents would put themselves in the path of an oncoming car if that is what it took to keep a child (even an adult child) from getting hit by that car, but would not wish their children to put themselves at risk to keep their parents from getting hit by a car. You just put your children first. They are the future and you are the past.
There is a word for parents who always insist on putting their needs ahead of their children – selfish. Or possibly self-absorbed.
Sadly, this only defers the exposure. You don’t control iPhoto’s webserver, or how it controls access to those photos within the Apple ecosystem. One talented hacker, or the right disgruntled employee, and your effort to keep those photos private become moot. Or a privacy policy change on Apple’s part that you miss. Even if you do control the webserver, anyone with access to view the photos can download and re-upload elsewhere. Simply downloading to their phone will add photos to that phone’s cloud account in most cases.
If you do control the server, at least you could watermark on the fly to identify which family member leaked any specific photo. So you could redirect the blame when your children complain later in life.
I did all of that. And I never shared anything negative about my kids. Not to anyone, not even their siblings or relatives.
To me, being their parent was a position of trust.
I feel very strongly about this. If you can’t trust your own parents to not say negative things about you to other people, who can you trust? (That should be “whom can you trust,” but I think it is more idiomatic to use “who.”)
Not in Cook County,Illinois, among other places…
<sarcasm off >
<cynicism always on >
It’s not their vote – unless they come back as undead.
How do we know for sure?😛
I just wrapped up a set of courses mandated by my employer (software company) on Cognitive Analysis, Data Science, Machine Learning, AI, etc. I would suggest a correction in your statement that I highlighted. It should read “The more you know about how this information is stored, analysed, and used, the more frightening it becomes.”
That is amazing I aspire to the same!
This woman reminds me of that awful Sally Mann, a photographer who took nude pictures of her children throughout their childhood and published coffee table books of them and made money off of them – unrepentantly.
Interestingly, almost every single commenter of the WAPO article thinks Christie Tate is narcissistic and selfish.
Why do you think that is? Maybe because she is narcissistic and selfish.
Agree, but I am always being surprised at commenters who agree with really ridiculous articles.
And I thought being a Preacher’s kid and therefore the inspiration for sermons was bad enough when I was growing up. However, I was at least asked for my approval.
As to Apple Photos and facial recognition: this was discussed here; all facial recognition is done on your machine, using the power of your device to detect faces that look alike. I do wish they would allow the user to toggle it off, but if you don’t use the feature on you Mac, you can turn off the circles that appear with “unnamed.” If you don’t supply data, the machine is left with a bunch of 1’s and 0’s it has correlated, but it isn’t shared with Apple. That’s not to say that Apple won’t change their User Agreement at some time, but backing away from their privacy push (which has become very public) would really hurt them.
Given that a lot (most?) of the “iCloud hacks” out there are due to bad security practices, I’d be more worried about your account security first , and then making sure that your personal photos are stripped of any data that identifies where it was taken (if not taken in an obvious place).
edit: corrected auto-correct
Somebody was zooming the public. There’s no [expletive] way individual devices are going to do facial recognition locally — the data isn’t local, for one thing. They don’t call these applications “Big Data” for nothing.
One of my most vivid memories is my mom at a playgroup. All of the other mothers were sitting around and complaining about their kids. My mom was silent, and I remember feeling like I was going to throw up, scared she’d start talking like they were. Because those other moms clearly didn’t like their kids. So eventually someone called my mom out on the fact that she wasn’t talking and she was like “I wouldn’t have talked about my (ex) husband this way in front of him or behind his back, and I won’t do it about my own kid either.” I have never felt more loved in my entire life.
I’ve tried my best to hold myself to the same standard.
My middle child Carrie had a moment like that too. She was working one summer at The Gap. One day, near Labor Day, she came home and said emotionally, “Mom, all day long I have been listening to parents complain about having their kids home for the summer and how they couldn’t wait until they went back to school. And the kids are standing right there! They must think their kids don’t have any feelings or something. And you never ever complained about us. Thank you.” :-)
Thanks! She now has her own small social media presence, where she tweets offbeat observances and aphorisms. She distinguishes herself by using our last name, with double vowels.