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.
It's great to see someone treat their child's privacy with some value, instead of using them as a way to endear themselves to virtual friends or get laughs and votes on reddit, while putting photos and information out there about their kid, without the kid's permission, that will be there forever. The rest of us had the opportunity to come to the internet in a time when someone wasn't putting our information out there.
Reserving accounts at places on their behalf, as well as domains, is also a smart choice. It isn't placing importance on anything. It is simply giving their child the option to have these things in the future. Hopefully, facebook won't exist when this kid grows up. But there's a chance it might. And if it does, then this kid doesn't have to compete with someone else taking the name. More importantly, it prevents someone else from pretending to be you.
I have to do this with my name, too. I have an account on Facebook, though I despise it. Same with the other big social networks and other things I don't use. I have been on the receiving end of someone who was upset with me (one a user I banned from my site after defrauding other users) and did things like make an account under my name and put awful stuff out there as "me". That would be more difficult to do if I'd already staked my claim to that identity (even if I didn't use it).
What these parents are doing is simply investing in retaining the tools with which their child will someday be able to safeguard their privacy and - if necessary - build their professional or other identity. It's worthwhile, today. It'll be even more worthwhile in the future.
Really, I fail to see how anyone can have any problem with this.
I don't have a problem with an attempt at privacy. I grok that: I have no social networking accounts, nor does my wife, nor is an electronic record of any child of mine tagged, tracked and overshared online.
What I don't get is the disconnect between their claim that oversharing is bad and privacy is good, but their actions that underscore a belief that Facebook is really, really important.
I think you're right. They're still in the baby boomer - brand is everything - mindset. At least she'll have a website where she can post her conference schedules and ebooks.
I don't really get the problem. While they have their priorities, Facebook IS important for many people, and might very well be in the future, so making sure to register the right usernames etc. in case is the right thing to do. Just like it's the right thing to do to register domain names if you start a company, regardless of whether you have an immediate intention of launching a website.
I think the emphasis on Facebook is simply because that is what readers are familiar with, currently. Of course they will have to be aware of and active in protecting identities on other future networks, platforms, and services, too.
At least, that is how I interpreted the references to "Facebook" every five words.
Congratulations, but your exception does not disprove my observed generalization. People are, unfortunately, not usually as discreet as you state you are.
The article struck me as paranoid, but I agree with your assessment that the authors' reserving their kids' digital real estate is not contradictory with the authors' concern -- it leaves the choice up to the child.
Sure, the spoken lesson is: be careful what you share, there are risks.
But the article isn't about privacy conscientiousness, it's about brand conscientiousness.
The author isn't talking about how she might construct rules to effect a safe space for her daughter to grow and learn and internalize these values, separate from known pitfalls that might cause her harm.
The author talks only about how she constructed a safe space for her daughter's brand, separate from whatever might befall her daughter while she's maturing.
It's might seem like a minor distinction, but it doesn't feel that way to me. It makes the whole article feel essentially disingenuous.
The idea is to get out ahead of all the social networking bits, and create a deliberately blank slate. All of that stuff is placeholder, neutral, for as long as the kid wants it to be so. The kid's free to fill all that in, or not, but the child won't start with a bunch of their personal data filled in. That last part is consistent with the stated beliefs/goals of the author, bearing in mind that over time data only accretes and there's no undo.
'Desirable' usernames are, technically speaking, as close to irrelevant to privacy as you can get. Your behavior with an account is what matters for privacy, not the account name. [1]
Yet the article is entirely about the account names and only somewhat in passing about the sorts of lessons the author hopes her daughter learns about "how (not) to conduct yourself online".
And without those lessons... you can 'protect' facebook.com/janeannsmith all you want, but if your daughter makes privacy-eroding mistakes with reddit.com/u/sparklepony2031 -- those can be trivially connected to facebook.com/janeannsmith the second you hand over the 'keys' to that account.
That's the whole point about the loss of privacy online. Once the accounts are associated to you, those associations last forever and follow you immediately and irrevocably anywhere else an account becomes associated to you.
[1] sure, sure -- using your real name as a username is Bad For Privacy, but the author wasn't talking about janeannsmith vs sparklepony2031. They were talking about janeannsmith vs jane-ann-smith and janeannsmith vs janineannsmith -- should jane ann smith have turned out to be the name of a porn star or third world dictator or some such.
Frankly, as far as privacy goes via name conflicts, you're better off being named Mike Johnson and having lots of collisions, even if some are negative, than having some unique name that doesn't have an online association yet. Some plausible deniability is better than none.
However, for branding, the opposite is true. Which, again, underscores how the author's behavior seems to be much more about branding than privacy.
Yes, thank you. That's an excellent way to put the same problem I had with this article. The first half is "we're protecting her privacy", and the second half is "we're building a brand identity which will deny her any anonymity".
From the article: "And to this day, we’ve never posted any content." They haven't built a brand (or denied her anonymity), just the empty space should she decide herself to build it.
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...
I think the point is to give your child the right to choose what (if any) they want to share at an age when they are old enough to responsibly make that decision herself, and not forcibly thrust into it before she could even talk, or walk.
I think we all understand that part (the "no posting pictures of our kid" part). It's just that many of us (myself included), don't understand the purpose of creating a bunch of social networking accounts for her at birth. Wouldn't it be better to let her create her own accounts when she's older? I mean, maybe she would rather have a different email address or Twitter handle. I think she should be allowed to discover the internet on her own terms, with some guidance from Mom and Dad, instead of being handed the keys to an "internet trust fund".
Unfortunately, I believe Facebook toed over that critical mass that has moved it into a long-term dominator of social networking. It has long since passed the point where it's going to just go away and be replaced by something else, like Myspace and other past social sites were. They may not be around forever, but it seems unlikely they'll be unseated any time soon. We are no longer in an age where a bunch of geeks moving on to something new changes the dynamic of the internet. We are now in a time when the average Joe Sixpack and his grandmother don't look for new things, don't try new things, and don't care about new things. They will stick with Facebook indefinitely, the same way a lot of people still stick with the big three over the air networks for their sole television entertainment.
Even if it doesn't disappear, it's guaranteed to change a lot in the future. As the top poster pointed out, this whole namestring-is-unique-token idea is not sustainable nor elegant.
Surely in the future there will be a better way of differentiating ourselves than "john-doe.com", "johndoe.com", "jdoe.me", etc. And what happens when JohnDoe #1 and John Doe #2 are famous people? Who gets the "verified" badge on social networks? It isn't sustainable, and Facebook and others are bound to change this sooner or later.
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.
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.
>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.
Yes, doing what everybody else is doing will lead to mediocre results by definition. But it will also minimize social friction (important!) and give you herd protection against certain kinds of downside risk.
There was an article recently that said that startups shouldn't innovate in non-core areas. This is precisely the advice of "do what everyone else is doing" at least for certain things.
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.
If I'm on a bridge, and people are jumping off en masse, then one of two things is happening:
1. They've all been mentally affected, in which case, I almost certainly am too, or;
2. They know something I don't.
It's disingenuous to throw out a contrived example of a herd of people nonsensically jumping off a bridge. If that many people are jumping off a bridge, you probably should too, because they probably know something you don't (yet).
There was a great Dilbert that had his mum asking him the "if everyone jumped off a bridge, would you?" question. His response was along the lines of "if they all came back and told me how awesome it was, yes".
Thank you, this puts a great twist on the situation.. basically saying that if all of his generally smart, sane friends all of a sudden jumped off a bridge, most likely there was a REALLY good reason behind why they did it
Then again, when everyone else is safe in the water and you're the last one on the bridge when the train comes through, you might feel a bit silly in the moments before your untimely demise.
If everybody in a neighborhood is dealing marijuana and then you show up and starting dealing heroin, a sudden increase in police activity and interest should not be surprising.
>But, when hundreds of thousands of people become underwater, Congress started to get involved to (attempt to) provide relief.
Yeah, I was almost afraid that I had bought too small of a house, knowing that I would have to pay for my share of the mortgage bailout in extra taxes and value lost to inflation, I might as well buy the most ridiculous crib I could get financing for. Right? But then it came to pass that those bailout programs never really did much for underwater and overextended homeowners. Of course, none of that really makes me feel better, except that I can still afford my mortgage.
That's my whole beef with the "underwater" thing. They seemed to think that house was worth the price they signed up to pay when they did it. Now those houses are not worth as much. Too bad, so sad. I think I should get congress to bail me out on buying a new car. It certainly is not worth as much as it was when I purchased it.
> It seems impossible to limit someone's exposure on Facebook,
I don't think anyone is forced to use it. I know several families who have account, yet, they don't share on it or use it for anything that could be embarrassing in the later years.
> especially when any 3rd party will happily post a photo of your family member online.
You should always explain to your friends what your expectation of privacy is. If they don't respect that, they are not your friends anyway.
I agree that society will adapt, but I wonder what will happen when people from different generations compete for the same jobs. To some extent we're beginning to see this with various hand-wringing about millennials.
It also has countless unspoken successes every single day. I have eliminated a great deal of the social clutter and hassle in my life by making a conscious effort to do what other people are doing, unless I have a reason not to. Everyone else is dancing at a party? Dance as well, even if it isn't your thing. Nobody else wears sandals to work? Don't either. Everyone else is driving home from the bar? Well... actually you had to much, take a cab instead.
Don't break the mold without a proper reason to. Now, are privacy issues going to come back and bit kids today in the ass? Maybe, I know I haven't always used my real name online, most people from my generation haven't. I figure that the kids who do are the ones breaking the mold now... I'm on the edge in that case.
Doing what everyone else is doing lowers social friction. We're discussing the idea of doing something while a child is young (posting about them online) that could haunt them later in life. If everyone is doing this, the social friction in the future will be less about having your childhood online.
In this case, the social friction itself is what would be possibly causing issues in the future, so lowering it would be improving the situation.
If you want to reference the Nazis, then it's the same thing. Doing what everyone was doing had lower social friction in Nazi Germany.
If registering your religious affiliation in your identity papers was what everyone was doing, maybe it lowered social friction, but in the long run it caused huge problems for a certain group of people when the government suddenly started tracking them down, and had very good tools to do so.
Whether or not this is a good or valid comparison, I think the argument about "if everyone are sharing, nobody will care" is plain wrong. In the right circumstances, it will always be possible to find some nugget of information to paint you in a bad light or cause you problems.
Either way, it's going to be very interesting to watch our future politicians lives be completely exposed down to the smallest detail, as it may be 20-30 years from now.
Yep, that's the problem. As a general rule, driving without a seatbelt is also pretty safe.. until it's not. The question is whether the advantage you get from something is bigger than the potential consequences.
I'd say, given the historical track record of governments during the last 100 years, that it's very gullible to believe that whatever future problems our current data sharing will cause will somehow be "fixed" and not have consequences just as long as it affects a critical mass of the population.
"I'd say, given the historical track record of governments during the last 100 years, that it's very gullible to believe that whatever future problems our current data sharing will cause will somehow be "fixed" and not have consequences just as long as it affects a critical mass of the population."
For that matter, parts of our government like the NSA and the DEA consider the over-sharing of personal data on Facebook to be a useful source of exploitable information. They'd probably quietly lobby against any legislation to scale it back.
Exatly. A major argument used in the debate about new data retention laws in Europe was just this: That in face of changing subscription types like prepaid cards, the police needed data retention to still have access to the same data as before.
Personally I do want to push them to be fixed if possible. I don't like real name policies, but I do consider anonymity only a workaround most of the time.
Right, why give your child a leg-up on all those kids that have had every second of their life broadcast online, when you can milk it for the next dozen years and let it be their problem, in the future?
> 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.
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.
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>.
> 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?
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.
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...
I wonder how many of these sites will still exist in 10-16 years time. Will gmail still be running? Will it be the goto email provider?
The thing that is most bizarre is they care so much about protecting the kids online identity yet they registered real names. What if the kid wants to use an alias? I find it all a bit odd.
I completely get keeping pictures off of facebook. This setting up a virtual identity.. its weird.
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.
>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.
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:
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."
Simple example: Your pretty child is also quite a bit overweight. Or fell and got a big bruise that you for some reason just treated yourself and failed to bring up in some health insurance form.
Less trivial stuff (like having acne) has been used to deny people coverage when they've been diagnosed with cancer.
This is just of the top off my head, which is the point: We simply don't _know_ what might happen in the future. Most probably (and hopefully) not much, put we don't know.
(1) that kid is not overweight and (2) it's actually OK from a medical perspective for a child to be a little overweight, as children grow in bursts, have a much better metabolism and their day is filled with plenty of exercise.
And in fact, if a kid doesn't have some meat on their bones, that's a reason for concern.
Agreed, but you're not making the argument that a potential health insurance company would (like the acne case I mentioned). And again, this is just off the top of my head. One specific case, one specific instance of "I didn't see that coming", while there may be lots and lots of other such cases.
[Edit: To make it clear, I haven't even looked at the picture previously posted, I was providing an unrelated example.]
This level of fear and worry about what an insurance company might try to argue seems too high, and not because insurance companies don't deny people for silly reasons, but because it literally isn't worth the years of fear and worry next to how little it will probably help. There are better sources of reasons to deny people, anyway, than pictures of chubby kids.
Again, this was just _one_ example of the top off my head. I could probably have come up with lots of others. My point being that we don't know how what we post today might be used in the future. Saying that it's not going to have consequences because everyone else will also do it is a very weak argument.
>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.
Some examples: you child ends up in a viral video and millions of children all over the world and at his school mock it (e.g the Star Wars Kid, and lots of others). How will that affect his growing up?
Or your kid is not really popular at high school, and some other kids dig up a naked baby pic of his. Nothing special, they just circulate it all around school and make fun of him, and he feels like slicing his wrists or something.
Or the kid posts itself something foolish at 16, which makes him unemployable from every employee that would search for him online.
I'm not claiming that we should share completely without judgement. Just that the vast bulk of things people share are easy to judge as innocuous.
The Star Wars Kid video is not a good counter-example, because it was never intentionally posted online by its creator -- it was found (on a videotape) by other people and posted, and those people knew they were posting it to make fun of it.
> Or your kid is not really popular at high school, and some other kids dig up a naked baby pic of his. Nothing special, they just circulate it all around school and make fun of him, and he feels like slicing his wrists or something.
Firstly, we're not necessarily talking about naked baby pics. The original article is about never posting any photo of their kid online.
Secondly, the kind of bullying you describe presupposes several much bigger problems that are the responsibility of the parent, and it is the behavior of parents that we're discussing.
You're looking at this from the perspective of a bullied kid who just wishes it was easier to hide. But if your kid is so emotionally fragile that having other kids laugh at innocuous baby pictures is enough to make him suicidal, you did a shitty job as a parent.
Lots of parents do, in fact, raise emotionally damaged children who are vulnerable to bullying. But it's not their photo-posting habits that really matters.
You don't see any difference between cute baby pics and star wars kid? I wouldn't put naked baby pics or anything on the internet, but saying no pics at all seems a bit over-paranoid. (And I am about as paranoid as they come).
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.
Kids have no say in anything... hence why you're liable for them till 18. It's a parents obligation to embarrass them... just easier now with social media.
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.
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.
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.
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!".
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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].
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
The old "you wouldn't understand if you aren't a yourself parent" line really is tiresome.
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.
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.
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..
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.
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...
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.
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/ .
None of these things existed 11 years ago, and I expect there will be a new set of things 11 years hence.
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!
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! :-)
Haha, yes, that's the first thing she got into and she still watches them. Mostly http://www.youtube.com/user/FluffyJetProductions who is quite entertaining. This has now fuelled a rather expensive Kinder Egg habit..
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.
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.
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.