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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
To be clear – I’m addressing the comments that referenced the Apple ecosystem, since people were referring to iPhoto/Photos. Likewise, I’m only addressing this part of your post.
It maybe creepy to some, but your machines can analyze your photos while otherwise idle.
1 – individual devices have a lot of unused processing power that can be used when the device is otherwise idle. SETI@home started taking advantage of this unused power in 1999 to process data sets users would retrieve. The processing power of today’s CPUs, not to mention the GPU’s, even in mobile devices, is greater by several orders of magnitude. Images are just a different type of data set.
2 – images are stored locally at some point, in some form, whether full size or compressed; again, this is in reference to comments about Apple devices.
3 – I’ve taken my system offline and let it sit. It continues to do the analysis, where it detects face shapes, comes up with a result, and then compares it to other results. It is up to me to put a name to the result.
I have a cousin who is very proud to remind everyone she’s not on FB. Yeah … no. She’s on FB. Her friends have posted pics that she’s in.
BTW, the SEALS have amazing software. I posted a pic of one with my son. I didn’t use his name and neither were in uniform. I got a text from him a few months later – he’d been contacted that there was a pic of him on the internet and they traced me through the URL.
I told my cousin to get whatever software the SEALS have …
She understands and controls her online presence. That is the best way to maximize the advantages and minimize the risks. My kids and I used to discuss such things regularly, because I was making my living as a CompuServe sysop when they were little. We could see what was coming.
I remember reading many of your posts involving her, and thinking, here is a parent who agrees with me about treating kids with respect. Too many parents (and adults in general) expect to get respect without giving it.
My family’s culture is that if parents aren’t willing to criticize their children openly, they’re spoiling them, hence being bad parents. I’m not saying this is right, just that it is, and there’s tremendous pressure on me now that I’m a mom to say negative things about my children when my blood relatives — especially my own mother — are around.
To my blood relatives, not criticizing my children openly would be a very un-conservative thing to do. Because kids these days… they’re too full of themselves, and all of ’em need taking down at least a peg or two. And so do young mothers uncomfortable with criticizing their kids enough, since that discomfort is almost certainly spoiling innocent young children, turning them prematurely into delinquents and failures.
(Sometimes the trope that you’re a bad conservative if you’re not willing to be harsher on people really, really pisses me off.)
You also use a pseudonym, which helps.
One reason I keep a pseudonym here (and a much weaker-than-I’d-like-but-I-was-told-weakness-was-the-price-of-publishing-anything pseudonym elsewhere) is because, without it, I’m not sure the pseudonyms I give my kids would do much good.
You might try having a calm and quiet conversation with your mother about this, a conversation that is not related to a particular issue or event. It will be a good rehearsal for when your kids have disagreements with each other or with their father and want you to take sides. :-)
Once upon a time in a land far away, I was teaching in an 8-grade, 8-teacher Lutheran elementary school. Plus a kindergarten. Teachers sitting down at teachers meetings tended to share their gripes about particular children and their parents. An older and wiser member of our faculty blew up at one point and said he didn’t want to hear those things, because it made it difficult for him to get off to a fresh start with new students in his classroom (and their parents) when he had all of those preconceptions fed to him. (I remember the scene, but not the actual words.) So we behaved better after that.