I'm sure you've all noticed my remarkable self restraint and the lack of baby pictures. No? Just me?
Well, I have noticed and I am very proud of myself. It was actually on my list of things to figure out before baby arrived. "Discuss Internet privacy with Ryan." And then we didn't. And then I felt like if we hadn't bothered to make time for it we obviously didn't care and I had a free pass to post whatever I wanted!
But after my first baby post, Ryan gently said, "Hey... maybe we shouldn't share Orion's pictures where the whole Internet can see them." And I reluctantly agreed. But why?
I think when we first made this decision, we just had a vague sense that it's safer somehow. We actually do have a private Facebook group where just family and close friends can see what we post (which is ironic because we should only be "friends" with family and friends, but with all the networking I've been doing lately I have a lot of people who I just don't know that well).
So I guess I'm glad that I don't have to worry about the pictures floating around in Google image search or some weirdo running across them on my blog and using them for whatever gross purpose. But I also realized that, outside of the unlikely event that some pervert would find my blog/various social media accounts/etc and enjoy baby photos in a way I don't want them to be used, there's other things that can happen too.
Do you guys remember when Helene's photo was used by some right-wing Facebook group to make fun of "bleeding heart liberals"? She asked for people's help in reporting it to Facebook to get it taken down since it was literally a photo of her and the group didn't have the rights to it. I thought for sure Facebook would help her out since stealing her image is a copyright violation, and I sent in a report to try to help.
Their response? Basically fuck you.
Did not care one bit. It wasn't sexually explicit or offensive to a religious group (funny story about that - see at the bottom), so it wasn't worth doing anything about. The theft was not their problem.
So yeah. To me that seems far more likely, with the sheer number of people who think it's ok to just grab images off Google and use them for their own projects and I don't want Orion's image to be used for that either, even if it's less revolting than my first example.
That's one side of the coin. The other is that, even if no one outside of family uses his photos for anything, as Orion gets older we might realize that we're using his photos in ways he doesn't want.
My mom was telling me just the other day that one of her Facebook friends posted a video of her kid pooping. Potty training - ok, it might be cute or funny or whatever, but when your child is 15 that video is still going to exist on the Internet (nothing goes away on the Internet - just ask all the celebrities who have had photos leaked or tried to get images removed. It's impossible) and, if someone was really determined, could be found and watched and used to make fun of your child later on.
We all know cyber bullying is becoming a huge problem and I doubt that's going to go away in the future (kind of like Facebook - I think Facebook is the most timeless of all the social media sites simply because it's the most widely adopted). Again, if my Facebook was locked down tight, I wouldn't have to worry about it. But it's not, and who knows how far technology will have gone in 15 years. Will I still be tech savvy enough to keep my accounts from being phished? I hope so, but I'm not going to make any plans based on it.
The bottom line is that, even if none of this stuff happened, we want Orion to have some amount of control over his own image. If I throw photos around the Internet like glitter on New Year's Eve, then by the time he's old enough to express an opinion, it's too late. Nothing can be done.
But if I set up a specific outlet for sharing - one private Facebook group - then I know who's viewing AND if 12-year-old Orion says, "No, I don't want those photos available for anyone to see. Screw you, Grandma!" I can delete the group and all the photos with it (after giving him a talking to about his potty-mouth, of course).
So that's our reasoning! I'd be curious to know how other people feel about sharing or not sharing. (And I absolutely don't want to shame anyone who does share - when it comes to my own image I've always felt that anonymity is safety enough. Basically in the deluge of photos from the millions of people on our Earth, who is going to care about yours specifically?)
How do you approach Internet privacy? Would you/do you treat your child's images and privacy differently than your own?
Oh! And my story. So my friend is an artist (she makes gorgeous shadowboxes) and she was putting together a Facebook page for her art using her name, which is Deanna Zions. Facebook kept telling her she couldn't use that page name/url because it was inappropriate. We must have checked a dozen times trying to make sure she didn't spell something weird and trying to see where a bad word could possible be.
Have you figured it out yet? The url would have been facebook.com/deanNAZIonsart.
After we figured it out, and I laughed my ass off, she changed it to be www.facebook.com/dzionsart (which you should check out because she's awesome or her website www.deannazionsart.com because I designed it).
