This seems incredibly odd to me.<p>On one hand, they indicate strongly valued privacy with the "no posts about the child" rule; seemingly recognizing the hidden costs of permissive 'oversharing'.<p>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 <i>value</i> and importance of being able to overshare?<p>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 ?<p>Securing facebook.com/janeannsmith to spare her facebook.com/123456789 or something?<p>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?<p>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 <i>junior high</i>.<p>The ephemeral nature of these networks (over such time frames) only further underscores the apparent importance the parents are placing on <i>precisely</i> identifying her online history. (getting that facebook username <i>just in case</i> it's still relevant...)<p>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.<p>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.
I'm a new parent and my wife and I are not taking any measures to minimize our kid's Facebook exposure.<p>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).<p>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.
> 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.<p>Let me guess. She'll probably reject that envelope for the following reasons:<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
> 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.<p>> 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.<p>> 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.<p>While I can definitely understand the sentiment and have thought about doing similar things, seeing it all laid out like this seems very strange.<p>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?<p>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?
The author is wrong because she assumes social customs are immutable. They aren't.<p>In 2028 there will be nothing embarrassing about appearing in thousands of online photos dating back to your birth. Because <i>almost everyone</i> will be in the same boat.<p>In fact, it may be considered weird and suspicious if there's not much online content about you.
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.<p>1: <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/data_mine_1/2013/07/data_driven_parenting_tracking_baby_sleep_eating_and_pooping_on_spreadsheets.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/data_mine_1/2013/07...</a>
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>This ain't going back 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.<p>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.
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.<p>Kids grow up in their own world, not ours. The idea of checking domain names and Instagram account names <i>before</i> choosing the child's name is hilarious to me. Like domain names and Instagram are going to matter to teenagers 16 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.<p>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.<p>Maybe you're not taking pictures of your daughter, but someone else will, and they can tag her with metadata for their own purposes.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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].<p>[1] <a href="http://www.academia.edu/1518346/Link_Prediction_in_Highly_Fractional_Data_Sets" rel="nofollow">http://www.academia.edu/1518346/Link_Prediction_in_Highly_Fr...</a>
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?<p>> 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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)<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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 <i>pictures</i>, but they made sure her name was easily Googleable?<p>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.<p>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... <i>Somehow</i>, I says, they managed to turn out all right.
What a great idea!<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
This is dumb beyond belief.<p>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.
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.
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.<p>Resistance is futile.
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.
I know this is smarmy but, check out this screen shot with a google ad in the article: <a href="http://imgur.com/dB9cyeQ" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/dB9cyeQ</a>
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.
Does anyone else do this (or something similar)?<p>I'm curious to see how people introduce the Internet to their children in a relatively-responsible way.