I sympathize with this perspective. I too would be livid and mortified if my family shared embarrassing photos of me in exchange for the quick dopamine hit that validation from acquaintances provides.
I'm hopeful that in the next several years there is a pushback against social media and the idea that for an experience to be valid, it must be shared. There's something to be said for having an album of photos that you pull out a couple of times a year to show a select group of others. It makes the experience much more valuable than blasting out content for everyone to see.
Makes me think that Gen Z is much wiser than the Millennials. People coming of age today are much more cautious than those who did 5-10 years ago (lots of drunken party photos on Facebook, etc). They understand the consequences of having information in the world that never goes away.
It's interesting how that changed within one generation in many cases. Millennials started using the Internet when conventional wisdom was to not use your real name online. Don't reveal your age or location. Don't post your photo. Use an anonymous name.
The internet from 10 years ago was also less likely to remember everything you do forever. Messaging between friends happened using services that didn't save conversation history server side, public chat rooms including IRC were rarely logged, blog posts had a minimal reach, and were largely pseudonymous anyway, making the connection with a real person more difficult. Perhaps this kind of lack of consequences drove people into complacency.
In fact, young me didn't think that websites, mostly forums and early microblogging sites, would ever go away. I wish I could see those posts today.
It may be a fabricated memory, but I remember always being aware of the lack of privacy in those services. And never using your last name or sharing your location.
are all your gmail and facebook messages from 10 years ago not still available? I think youd have to go back more than 15 years to get to services where communications are now faded.
Yes. The last generation was taught from a very young age that what you put online is available for all, and learned from the mistakes of their older siblings / parents. I see way more "controversial" content on facebook / instagram from my older friends than from the younger ones.
Lets not speak to soon until we see this gen at adult age. The self censor in the past was that college admissions will dig for your social media pages. I remember in high school people changed their names on Facebook until they were accepted to their colleges. One kid at another local school got an offer rescinded over a tweet even back then. Once these kids got their first jobs after college, then my feed was a deluge of psuedoscience, political bait, and multi level marketing, all of which these same people would have avoided posting during highschool out of fear of consequence, and now that they are employed adults there are seemingly no repercussions, to them at least.
> There's something to be said for having an album of photos that you pull out a couple of times a year to show a select group of others. It makes the experience much more valuable than blasting out content for everyone to see.
While I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment, and mostly agree with the idea, a part of me sees that only as a change in scale. As someone that doesn't really partake in social media sharing (I use FB for event notification) or take many pictures, I see parallels between sharing the album and posting online. I've had plenty of embarrassing childhood photos shown. Generally the only difference is time from the event.
I mean, it's not like a couple hundred years ago we even had the option to do this (other than the obscenely rich getting portraits painted).
I note all this because I find often when it appears it's just scale that makes a difference, that's just hiding the real things that are causing concern (or perhaps we should also be concerned to some degree about the small scale as well). So in this case, is sharing an album really all that much better? If so, is it because of temporal distance to the events, reduced group size per sharing instance (the overall size might be the same, over time), or sharing with people that aren't in some tighter group (or some combination thereof)?
Scale has a multiplicative (maybe even compounding in a viral network) effect. Therefore usability * scale means scale itself is part of the problem, if not the underlying one.
>There's something to be said for having an album of photos that you pull out a couple of times a year to show a select group of others.
My perhaps unreasonable hope for a Facebook killer is just a paid personal archive of your own photos, writings, etc. with the assumption of privacy by default.
Have you tried iCloud / iPhone? That's what I switched over to once I quit Facebook and Android. The iPhone is great, it's private by default, I can share photos / albums only with the people that I want, and I create different groups based off of different interests, trips, etc. All together with iMessage and Notes I get pretty much everything I had with a newsfeed / blog, all without the implications of Facebook and giving up all of my privacy.
The old school version is my aged mother finding birth announcements from the late 50s and early 60s handwritten by my aunt for each of her four children. My aunt passed away five years ago. She sent the originals to each of my cousins by snail mail. They were thrilled to receive such a thing written by their mother.
How permanent would such a thing be in the long run, though? I ask this as someone who will soon have to download their G+ data before the service is shut off in a couple of weeks. Not to mention the recent MySpace debacle where a lot of data was lost due to a system migration.
Also, the assumption of privacy is nice, but how private is it actually? For example, you'd have to break into my house and steal my photo album to see pictures of me as a baby.
Not trying to be contrary, I guess I just don't resonate with social media that much. A private personal archive of my data would be one that I control on my own devices. I treat posting to the cloud, in whatever form, as making it public despite whatever assurances they have about privacy, unless it's something like my taxes or banking information where there are strict laws involved.
The thing about G+ is that it wasn't their core business. There are a lot of replies to my comment talking about existing solutions... which are also peripheral to the companies offering them. I hope that at some point someone makes what I described their core business, with the ability to get your data out painlessly as a hedge against the finite lifetime of the service.
If you have an Amazon Prime subscription you get unlimited photo storage and a certain amount of space for videos/documents for free.
You can also create groups and post photos/videos to that for sharing with family.
Only issue I've run into is the Amazon Photos app on Android doesn't always back up photos as timely as I'd like, and deleting photos on my phone (wanting them to stay in the cloud) results in some odd behavior with images not loading, even though pulling up a computer they're still there.
I also have a quite large video that it keeps getting stuck on with the upload, which might be part of the issue.
google photos stores all your images and videos for free (well it downscales them to 14m if they are over) - but for most people this is essentially free and forever. You can choose to share images and folders/albums - or even share everything. You can also ask it to pull from folders on your phone or computer - so every time I take a new photo it is saved.
It then does nice 'reminders' of your images and videos from years back.
This plus google docs if you want to save private writings has you pretty much covered.
I am very happy to be off social media now - my vague replacement is sharing things to Whatsapp with selected friends and family.
The one problem (as far as owner privacy/access control) with these Google services is that the read-only sharing method is essentially irrevocable (without moving the item in a way which causes Google to host it at a different URL) and infinitely resharable by anyone who gets access independent of the owner.
> My perhaps unreasonable hope for a Facebook killer is just a paid personal archive of your own photos, writings, etc. with the assumption of privacy by default.
Really, the only reason Google’s collection of online services (Google One, basically,though the individual services mostly are older than that bundling) falls down here is that several of them use unguessable URLs and URL sharing as the private sharing mechanism (at least for read only sharing), instead of revocable access delegation.
Its more practical to teach the younger generation to assume that everything is public by default and equip them with necessary skill to deal with this.
At least thats what I will teach my kid.
My wife and I recently had our first child, and we decided we didn't want her to have any kind of social media presence until she was old enough to make that decision for herself.
It's been a challenge ensuring friends and family don't post stuff about our daughter, but reading this reinforces that we're making the right choice.
One of the reasons I left Facebook was the amount of web presence people give their young children.
It's not that I don't think children are adorable. I'm talking about parents who have a baby and then spend every day posting photos about every event in the child's life. I know 3 people in my relatively small circle who have been posting on behalf of their children for years.
Maybe I'm a freak, but I think there's something seriously messed up with having one's life broadcasted to strangers. I'm not saying that it's bad to include updates about/with one's children occasionally in social media posts, but I think it's wrong to make a child's entire life an open book without their consent.
Worst of all, it's not really about the child. I mean, it kind of is, but it's mostly for the parents to feel good.
I totally agree, I deactivated my Facebook a few years back. We use WhatsApp to share pictures and information about our baby with close friends and family, just hope the end-to-end encryption is legit. One big concern for me was the idea of Facebook having a 'shadow profile' of our daughter without our consent.
The point is, if you are sharing it with close family/friends, and their presence in the photo could prompt them to share it in their facebook. So in some way, it will end up in someone's profile with a tag to you/your kids name, unless you explicitly say every time "don't share".
To your point about strangers: There are two basic ways to use social media: public to the world and friends only. I feel like the first is a non starter, do you feel the same about the second use-case?
Not necessarily. It'd be one thing if these "friends" were people the child might actually know in real life, and whom have a meaningful relationship to the parents.
The problem starts for me with the fact that most of the "friends" people have on sites like Facebook are not actual friends, but acquaintances they might not have seen or talked to again for years. Most of the my "friends" on Facebook have hundreds of "friends", sometimes thousands. For all intents and purposes, most of those people are strangers.
I never thought about it until yesterday, when my daughter asked that we take a "selfie" together; I thought it was a great picture and put it on Instagram. Later she wanted to browse through my pictures and asked me, shocked: "You put that on Instagram?!"
I had never really considered it to be an issue (I have a private account, pictures only get shared with friends family), but thinking more on it- she really should be asked to consent to share it, even if my account is locked down. I've been telling her (for as long as it's relevant) that anything on the internet stays there forever, and we've had talks about privacy when they want to install some cheap knock-off F2P mobile game that wants access to your entire phone, but this is another aspect I need to consider.
A few years ago now I had a slightly distant cousin ask if she could take photos of my nephew and I thought needing to ask was some ridiculous paranoia about pedophiles or something, she's family, of course she can take photos.
Now you've made me wonder if "can I take a photo" carries an implicit "and share them around the world" with it. In hindsight as someone constantly being forced into photos it seems to.
My sister had a baby last year, and she's been posting and sharing photos and videos non-stop.
Recently she asked me if I knew if hackers could break into baby monitor because she was worried some hacker may spy on her sleeping baby... I had a good laugh first, then I felt sad for her.
> I had a good laugh first, then I felt sad for her
It's an issue of consent. She's voluntarily sharing specific selected photos & videos with her social peers, a hacked baby monitor would be a violation. The glib dismissal here helps nobody.
Her baby hasn't given consent. Believe you me, there's loads of 'Invasion of Privacy' lawsuits from kids to their parents coming down the pipe over the next decade.
I just saw a clip from one of those scared straight shows last night and this was my first thought. These kids are going to hit 18 and sue the everlasting hell out of anyone who had anything to do with this. Leaving aside the questionable effectiveness of those programs to begin with, all I could think was how can a parent allow their kid to be put on tv and abused in such a vulnerable position no matter how bad they are.
I think it's the same for these kids who have been posted on social media by their parents. Kids get their lives ruined by this type of stuff. The internet has a long memory, and these children are in no way capable of consenting. Yeah it's not Cash Me Outside girl bad but you're still potentially putting still maturing children on display to be potentially mocked by random internet mobs. Forever.
That's true, but it is a separate (and valid) issue.
The distinction between sharing specific photos and hacked baby monitor, as pointed out by ianlevesque, is still important and it's wrong to casually dismiss it.
> Recently she asked me if I knew if hackers could break into baby monitor because she was worried some hacker may spy on her sleeping baby... I had a good laugh first, then I felt sad for her.
and what did you tell her?
"Baby" gadgets and toys are the most vulnerable. I liked the story where a teddy bear that allowed parents to leave messages was hosting recordings and replies on a public fileserver. You have to get more imaginative to think about who would take advantage of that and why, but its a valid enough answer, especially for a simply "spying" concern.
I have a background in both embedded systems engineering and pentesting. I definitely know about the weak security (or complete lack thereof) of those devices. But it's hard for non-technical people to believe that, especially if the salesman told them this camera was the 'best of the best'.
So, of course I helped them to setup the IP camera in such way that they could use it securely. (VPN, strong encryption on their WiFi, etc)
And of course I also explained them that they should be careful with whom they share the photos.
I would make a broader argument: don't post things about people without their permission. The friend you're quoting for saying something interesting didn't necessarily want to make a public statement. The random person caught in your picture might not want to share their location with Facebook.
I'm glad that you are thinking starting from your daughter, and I hope that the pattern continues.
We did the same thing. We told my inlaws that before she was born and my mother-in-law still posted my daughter's birth announcement before my wife was done with skin to skin. She would not stop taking pictures in the post-partum room.
Aw that sucks! We had a similar thing. Told everyone during the pregnancy that we didn't want it on facebook, and MIL still posted information on Facebook.
We deliberately didn't tell anyone when my wife went into labour, as she didn't want anyone else there.
We did a similar thing, ask that no photos be posted, no discussions, etc. from family members
Obviously, there are still "leaks", but clearly discussing it with people and explaining why usually is enough. Although we get some strange looks, I explain what I personally can do with just a small dataset, and then people respect it.
I think it's probably the single largest threat to our society, because it's essentially normalizing zero-privacy. I personally think it should be a choice that can be made at 14 or something. I'm a libertarian, but I often think laws to protect children are relatively good. As such, I think a law protecting a child's privacy is probably something we as a society should consider. Implementation would be quite difficult, however.
The problem has more to do with the future adult. My work related to ML has me horrified to think of the future. With enough data about a child (and enough of a training dataset), it should be possible to predict outcomes (political leaning, wealth, death, etc.)
We've got a very similar scenario. Our daughter is nearly 6 now. She participated in some community events that ended up with her attributed photo on a local newspaper website (which I'm okay with-- we knew the "danger" when she wanted to participate in the events). Aside from that we've managed to keep attributed photos of her off the Internet. A couple of family members have posted photos of her but have been kind enough to avoid attribution.
(I do wonder how facial recognition will deal with ex post facto attribution of photos of children, given how our faces change as we age. Up to about age 4 my daughter was nearly indistinguishable from one of her cousins in photos-- a testament to the power of my wife's family's genetics, I guess...)
I made the same decision. My daughter is now 5, no social media pictures of her. I do share pictures of her to a few family members over Google Photos, and I keep track of her life in a private email account that I will give to her when she turns 13.
We haven't decided that yet (she's only 3 months old at this point). We'll discuss that when/if she decides she wants to be on social media. Hopefully by then there will have been more studies into the effects of social media use with age, and we can make an informed decision :)
I have done the same thing as OP. The kid doesn't get photos put online outside Google Photos, and those are only shared with family members who know not to leak them.
For me, old enough is "when you can demonstrate meaningful understanding of the negatives of the platform". "I want to because my friends use it" isn't enough. "I want to but I'd only use [Snapchat-style ephemeral data] so people can't make fun of me with it" is much closer, as is "I want to because I want to talk to my friends but I wouldn't connect with people who aren't my friends".
So it's not a hard number, but my guess is that it's going to be about 13, like others have said.
Similarly, my daughters are now 15 and 13, we never put any photos of them on social media, we used private DropBox or iCloud albums to share stuff with family.
Kids realizing they already have an online presence made by the people who were teaching them about being responsible about their online presence is becoming A Thing. Two other stories with similar circumstances:
That's not far from doxxing or harrassment (from the child's point of view).
Can those kids contact website support to have it all removed, or relatives accounts suspended? If a stranger posted about your kid, the consequences would be something else and of different magnitude.
>> My daughter didn’t ask to have a writer for a mother, but that’s who I am. Amputating parts of my experience feels as abusive to our relationship as writing about her without any consideration for her feelings and privacy.
This part got me. To me that article definitely makes it sound like she's a writer first, and mother second. I just hope her child grows up to be a better person than that, or I hope I'm misunderstanding that article.
I cannot imagine posting so much about a child of mine without them being aware of it at all. I talk a lot about my sons. They know. If I feel it is a story with sensitive information, I run it past them to see if they are okay with me saying that.
I can't really comprehend the thinking here of the family members who did this. They talk about her but not to her?
That's the opposite of "social" behavior. That's treating her like an object, not a person.
Yeah, this is a little weird. I have a 5-year-old and she knows we post pictures and videos of her on Facebook and Instagram for her family to see. Heck, she even asks us to take a video of her when she’s doing something silly or ridiculous. Not once have we ever lied to her about posting or hid it from her.
Then again, I think I’m a more permissive parent than most and I don’t really shelter her from anything.
Just for the record, I was not questioning the veracity of the story.
Lots of weird things happen in the privacy of home. Children are especially vulnerable to having a fast one pulled on them.
So I don't see any reason to question the story at this time, though I'm also not up for trying to actually verify the veracity so as to win some internet argument.
I am not friends with my family on Facebook. I will not be that until Zuck gets it through his scull that people need more than one identity, and Facebook implements it so that I can keep things 100% separated.
As such I don't think I have seen either of my family members Facebooks, except if I accidentally glance in the direction of their phones.
I'm more surprised by the story telling and narrative of the 14 year old author! Impressed. Pretty sure the only thing I was worrying about when 14 was how to get past the min. word count and not use "however" so much.
Since this is the 21st century and everyone's on a hair trigger for reasons to be offended, everyone in magazines like that is edited, so there's nothing particular about this author getting edited. Magazines have editors for a reason. Nobody produces the best prose on their own without any editing.
The only thing in the article that really struck me as strained was the "We are also the next generation of engineers and innovators," bit. Wouldn't be surprised that was a whole-cloth editorial insertion.
> really struck me as strained was the "We are also the next generation of engineers and innovators," bit.
People have been saying this to kids non-stop, so it's not a stretch to think that they would parrot it as well. I think both explanations are plausible.
I agree. It was just the one thing that kinda struck me as a bit off. My experiences with that age range and my experiences being that age range are such that that's not something really on our minds at that age. The only thing a conventionally-schooled 8th grader knows and can remember is being in school. (Not quite the same age range, but I told my 2nd grader that I use math a lot at work and I'm pretty sure that there was at least a period of time where he thought I basically go to work every day and do addition problems... I'm still not sure that's not necessarily the subconscious view he has.)
Feels so fake, to be honest. I don’t know, may be she surely is that gifted or developed, but internet made me skeptical and doubtful about everything.
Indeed, really impressive. It also impressed me to see what she's involved in at school:
> Sonia Bokhari is an 8th grader and a persuasive and narrative writer. She is also the leader of her middle school’s Gay-Straight Alliance and a member of the school’s Environmental Club.
Definitely. Some of my stuff was published when I was really young. From what I remember it was edited for clarity and slightly reordered for a better narrative. Core ideas and point persisted.
She definitely didn't write this as-is. No 14-year-old writes this well. It feels as it if was the result of an interview, transcribed by an adult into the first person.
"How did you feel? Did you feel betrayed?" "Yeah I guess. It's embarrassing."
=> "I felt utterly embarrassed, and deeply betrayed."
Also this...
> I feel like I’m being spared from what could potentially be dangerous for me at such a young age.
... is definitely written by an adult. For one thing, 14 year olds don't think they are young.
I as a soon 16-year old definitely still consider myself a child, it's ignorant to disagree with what is practically proven. I'm definitely not as wise as this 14-year old, makes me a bit jealous, have to admit.
This seems to me (albeit as a probably completely unqualified person to have a real viewpoint here, as a 50ish male without children) to be much ado about nothing.
Somehow, perhaps because of the pervasiveness of social media, the sense of self has expanded quite a great deal.
In a family, and later in public life, we don't have the right to control how we are perceived in the public. (I know some countries in the EU have differing views on that, but I disagree with them as well).
Just as the daughter has the right to not share herself or her life on social media, I don't believe she has the right to demand approval of her mother's or sister's posts.
I would argue that the mother and the sister have an equal right to share their lives as they wish, that includes things that were given or said to them by the daughter that is now aghast that these items were shared further.
Freedoms are always a balancing act. Every time we expand our personal sphere of control, we are impinging on the sphere of control of someone else.
I mean, I get the sentiment, and I get that a 13/14 year old would be embarrassed by these types of things, but that is unfortunately what life is like. We get to control the things we say and do, but we don't get to control what others do with it.
> Just as the daughter has the right to not share herself or her life on social media, I don't believe she has the right to demand approval of her mother's or sister's posts.
A legal right? Absolutely not. A moral right? Absolutely.
Knowingly disclosing information about someone that that person has expressly confirmed they would like to remain private is certainly not a friendly act. When the parties involved are in a close relationship, this can feel like (and in my view is) a serious betrayal. Such a betrayal can permanently damage that relationship.
The daughter's feelings in this situation are entirely valid, and she is entirely within her moral rights to demand her mother not violate her privacy.
> > Just as the daughter has the right to not share herself or her life on social media, I don't believe she has the right to demand approval of her mother's or sister's posts.
> A legal right? Absolutely not. A moral right? Absolutely.
Depends on your jurisdiction. In some regions, the subject of the photo is the legal owner, and absolutely has the right to control distribution.
A few parents have always tried to use their kids as a means for more than attention (fame, money, power). Now that advertisers see the influence that a few parents have, they are rabid with dollars.
On the far left side of the power law curve of that, we have:
“Online and Making Thousands, at Age 4: Meet the Kidfluencers“
It's important that society maintains the illusion of fame through talent. If we decentralize our entertainment, the established political class has much less authority.
I remember years ago reading an article stating that a time will come when young adults will sue their parents for posting pictures of them younger or stories.
Of course it was a bit extreme, but when I read that I'm afraid it might happens.
To my big shame I'm also quoting my kids sometimes on FB. But there are no picture of them online.
And I use FB with a pseudo and quote the with aliases only family know, so I guess it's not as bad.
I get mortified about some of the stuff I see parents posting about their kids on social media. It's like they don't even realize they are living beings with feelings of their own and not some lifeless prop. Especially when its complaining about the kid... do you really want to publish that comment? Are you ok with them seeing it one day?
I don't mind occasional non-embarrassing non-inappropriate pictures and stories, but FFS, please don't live stream their entire life, it just seems so disrespectful to the kid.
It's also uninteresting to everyone else but you and perhaps the grandparents to boot.
Why quit? Why not just tell your parents to make their accounts private, or remove the images that you're not comfortable with? I feel like there are solutions here that don't involve delaying the parent's participation in social media until the child is old enough to choose to accept it.
As much as this concerns the child's social media life, it's also a matter of the parent's experience. Parents post this stuff to share, and commiserate, and participate with other parents in the experience of parenthood. I find it difficult to accept that this girl will grow up and privately horde all of her children's images and information until they give consent to release it. Teenager tend to struggle with the fact that the people around them have lives as well.
All that said, I operate my social media very differently than this girls parent's seem to. I prune and keep friends lists very inner circle, I never post anything publicly, and I often show my children the pictures that I'm posting and get them involved in the process. they won't be surprised about social media when they become teenagers.
I think the next generation of people are just going to need to develop a thicker digital skin.
People have been sharing wallet photos of their kids for generations now, no one has a problem with that because you are basically saying "here's what my kid looks like these days" or "didn't he look like uncle dave in this picture? same nose," all very benign and also maintaining the kids privacy on their daily life, their feelings, and embarrassments and failures that can be so demoralizing when you are a kid. When you start religiously blogging your child's daily life, I'd say you have an unhealthy obsession toward social validation and it's unfair to your kid to use them to further your obsession.
I don't think it's (always) about being obsessed with social validation though, it's a new societal norm brought about by social media. In fact it's the _hook_ it's why people use social media at all, because you can _share your life_ with people in a way that wasn't possible before. The raising of children being a major part of that life. I would go as far as to say that the children aren't actually the subject in these posts, the real subject is the parent's life and the posts containing images and anecdotes of their kids are a side effect.
Maybe this is an opportunity for some social media company to get ahead of this and use facial recognition to tag people across ages. If the user decides that they don't want their image to appear on someone else's account, they can go through the images granularly and take them down.
I think what I'm getting at is that this is _new_. It's as new as is the ability of a 14 year old to express their frustration with something and have an audience of millions. I don't think the solution here is to tell parents that it's inappropriate to post about their children online. I think the real solution has more to do with finding a comfortable balance and set of controls so that everyone's interests can be accounted for.
p.s. I shuddered while typing "14 year old to express their frustration with something and have an audience of millions". The next 50 years are going to contain some _hard_ times.
Indeed, my kids did not ask to be in their own real life truman show. Their lives are theirs to live, not for the rest of the world (or even extended family and friends) to constantly observe.
We take a lot of pictures and videos of our kids, but we don't share almost all of it. I keep everything backed up safe with the intention of handing it all over to the kids once they're old enough. They're the subjects of the pictures, they're the owners.
I'm free of most social media. I only have a twitter, which I use to wile away time and keep up with bands going to my local music venus.
I have considered resurrecting my social media presence lately. I live a long ways away from my parents. I think it is kind-of nice to allow my parents to form a para-social bond with my online presence. Just so they can see how I am doing.
However, I keep coming back to the same mantra about social media: There is no wisdom here. I love learning, reading, experimenting with new hobbies. I am lifelong learner. Social media does not enhance that.
I tend to be a spitfire, and chewing out old people on facebook is NOT a good look. I do not want my past social media posts to come back to haunt me.
Also, I get a lot of anxiety when I am on social media. Old friends, old lovers, all of these messy complicated situations and people I have moved away from. Dragging all of that back up... no thanks.
We made a rule not to post our children's faces on social media. I just had to ask myself how I'd feel if I grew up and found a bunch of stuff on the internet about me I couldn't get rid of.
A 14 year old who is embarrassed by what their parents posted == a 14 year old who is embarrassed by what their parents did == a 14 year old.
When this girl grows up, she'll understand she was being immature and there's nothing embarrassing about your parents posting moments about you that made them proud. Her parents seem awesome that they're respecting her wishes now.
As I write this, I'm reminded of a Louis CK bit when he describes your thought process when you see a woman scolding her kid in public. When you're not a parent (which seems like most commenters here), you're thinking OMG what a terrible parent. When you're a parent, you're thinking what must that child have done to that poor woman.
This really reinforces a small conversation I had on Mastodon last week about creating mastodon communities for families (ie a family has their own private mastodon instance). Now mom, dad, gramma, and even younger kids can participate in social media together but not in the public eye. Maybe allow white listing of other families' instances so gram can keep up with other families or other grandkids not in her instance or so parents can plan stuff.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc are too big and too open for kids (heck, I am a father of two and I don't feel comfortable on the platforms because they are too public).
Also, I have no desire to see my children use traditional social media, they are toxic and are breeding grounds for bullying.
even those who post constantly are more aware than people just a few years ago about how much information the internet is absorbing about us.
I'm about 10 years older than the author, and we were aware. The Cambridge Analytica scandal is just the straw that broke the Camel's back. That was Facebook's MO all the way back circa 2010. It was just that most of us teenagers at the time simply didn't care. The adults warned us the same way they warn teens today but for the most part they didn't care about the data mining back then either.
I've given up on telling family to not post pictures of my kids on the internet. I just deleted all social accounts and no talk to them. Social media is utter cancer IMO.
This is a pervasive problem, where 3rd parties unintentionally emotionally effect other people with their social media posts. I was going to relate a story about how this effects people in polyamorous relationships, but then I realized this effects literally everyone who cares about anything strongly. And the long memory of digital artifacts creates additional opportunities to mess with people down the road.
It's pretty apparent the things that a kid would be embarrassed about are not the same thing I as an adult would be embarrassed about. I'm 20+ years removed from those events in my life where these kids aren't. To them this is recent memory and more importantly still stuff they will get made fun of for. How many people do you know who carried a nickname all throughout middle and high school from one dumb thing they did when they were 8? I know some who still have the dumb nickname 20-30 years after the fact.
This isn't child abuse by any means but it's just incredibly dumb on the parts of the adults around them. By writing/posting about kids you make them public figures and open them up to all the abuse anyone on the internet wants to heap on them. And this is all happening at a time when they are going through painfully awkward transitions and just starting to discover who they are and want to be.
There are absolutely going to be lawsuits about this sooner than you'd think.
Facebook launched when I was in college, and we were taught to treat it as a way of sharing pictures with your friends. We never got any training on what to share, what not to share, how permanent an online presence is, or anything since we were the first to use that sort of thing. It was just expected that new parents would post everything about their kid on there. Because you had that illusion of that it was "just for your friends". Most other social media sites like Xanga acted that way, and were usually gone within a few years. I think we have a lot to learn from Gen Z about the implications of making everything public and the dangers of social media. Because I can tell you that us millennials never learned any of that stuff except from news reports and by making mistakes.
We've always been protective of our young children's presence on social media, because of all of these concerns. (Bravo to the author for articulating them so well!)
One of the big challenges has been other people (family members, etc.) who want to take pictures of our kids or record some funny quote and post it on THEIR profiles. We as the parents don't always have control over that (and we've had to request more than once that somebody take something down they posted). It's awkward all around, and I'm not sure what the solution is other than developing manners as a society (just like people have been trained to write SPOILER ALERT before they blab about a movie in comments or whatever).
I love the idea of data locality: your home server contains your trove of photos, videos, music, and you grant limited shares to visitors. The digital equivalent of pulling out the photo album from under the coffee table.
This sort of idea dovetails nicely with the Secure Scuttlebutt concept that the social network graph mirrors the physical network: you swap the latest posts with others as you find yourself on the same local network.
Perhaps someday we will live in a more sophisticated world that relies less on centralized cloud providers and everyone runs a home server. Stories of youth pushing back against social media are certainly a step in the right direction.
Commercialise a shiny black box that plugs into the power (like a Wifi Extender), that:
1. Connects to the internet
2. uPnPs silently port 80 to itself
3. Registers a name with a dynamic DNS service (remember those?)
4. Has ~4GB local storage
5. Runs a 'newsfeed' type web portal or API.
6. Has a Phone app for easy sharing/creation of content.
Make this 100% turnkey for non-technical people and you MAY have a chance at getting people to stop storing personal stuff 'in the cloud'. I don't hold out much hope though.
Besides the fact that in the post-Let’s Encrypt world we should start expecting port 443 by default for any web service, for many ISPs running a publicly accessible server violates the terms of service unless your contract with the ISP is their business tier.
To make things worse, a lot of people are issued a router by their ISP where uPnP is disabled, and they do not have access to its firmware to change this or other settings.
Why build a home server and sit every family member down to teach them how to ssh and ftp when you can just have a dropbox/icoud/onedrive/etc that is already plug and play and out of the way of the user? You take a photo and it's on icloud immediately and synced to every account and machine. It would be great to have your own home server and be off the grid or whatever but that's just a tall order for a lot of people's computer skills, and if you start selling these theoretical easy to use home servers and dominate the market suddenly you wake up and you are also the big bad dropbox/icloud/onedrive/etc central entity.
This is one smart kid for that age. The critical thinking and reasoning skills are on point. Its comforting to know that the younger generations are more informed about the consequences of poor use of technology.
> Despite everything that had happened with my mom and sister, I had made one of the most common mistakes; all of my social media accounts were public.
I've taken the opposite stance and preferred public accounts: that way I don't post anything I'm not comfortable with being seen by the world. IMHO the false sense of privacy setting would end up making me providing a lot more data to networks.
When I was a child my parents would consistently tell me that I should never put details about myself on the internet. But when Facebook became a thing it was suddenly okay to share pictures of your birthday party with complete strangers.
Personally, I don't feel comfortable with the idea of my photos being taken out of context and used in a way that I wouldn't agree with. Oddly enough, most of my friends don't see this as an issue.
When Facebook first became a thing you only added people you knew, rejecting friend requests from people you didn't, so it didn't feel as weird to share a group photo from your birthday party. When I first joined the site I really only added my friends and acquaintances from school, I wouldn't even add relatives unless they were around my age.
While I think this 14 year old and story is authentic, I think this will be misused as a motivational story to fuel Zuckerberg's new white-knighting of privacy concerns. It's really important that Facebook be held to account for their negative influence, and not be allowed to distract with lofty future promises, and co-opt innocent peoples stories for cheap publicity.
For example, it would be trivial to default content be shared to friends only. If Zuck gave a true shit about privacy, that change could happen instantly, and years ago.
Yup. I remember the “vote” they held that essentially gave away any further say in how those kinds of decisions are made. “We heard you loud and clear–you didn’t vote, you must not care, so we’ll do whatever we want with your stuff now.” (Paraphrasing) of course they never actually intended it to be a democratic platform and knew full well what the results would be before even announcing it.
My wife and I don’t use Facebook or Instagram. When we have children I plan to setup an email account for them. I’ll document their life by sending them photos and messages as they grow up. If something ever happens to me they’ll know how much I cared about them. When they’re old enough they can choose what parts of their childhood they want shared with the public.
I immediately thought of the discourse surrounding Sally Mann upon reading this. The intent is different, the medium different, but I don't think the questions around her work have been satisfactorily resolved. If anything, they're heightened by the ease with which non-famous artists can gain extensive audience.
"Can a child freely give consent to be photographed, especially in vulnerable positions including nudity, when the photographer is a parent? Do these photographs unintentionally put children at greater risk given the reality of pedophilia in society? Do they unintentionally encourage a sexualized view of childhood? Does such work on any level exploit these actual children?"
As much as I want to believe it's a good thing for a kid to be away from social media, there doesn't seems to be any compelling argument for it in that article.
It seems like fear is her only justification, which to me if anything, is the worse reason to do anything. Being aware of the risk and mitigating it when necessary is the right way to do it, instead of simply letting fear control us. The strange thing is that she seems to be aware of that risk and did use methods to mitigate it.
Her lack of social media doesn't seems to affect her though, so I guess it's alright in her case. I know personally though that my group of friend and I had ton of trouble to include people without social media in any event organization, and the increased friction slowly pushed many of the ones without it away (while the solution, which did work for some, was simply a fully anonymous account, though I think Facebook now ban theses accounts).
Maintaining a circle of friends is a pretty weak justification for social media use. Many of my friends and I don't use social media at all and we have zero issues coordinating events. It sounds like the real issue is that you didn't value the connection to your friend enough to reach out to them. SMS and phone calls are still a thing.
I share most videos and pics to a family chat group but after reading this I went back and checked there were no embarrassing photos. Also just by posting, even to a private group, who knows if the images and videos are kept forever (whatsapp, instagram, snapchat)
reminds me of the onion video [0] on this from a 6 year old.
this is really challenging, I do not not have social media [1] and have not since 2007/8 ish and yet I know that people still post things about me and sometimes forward me an email of a picture posted at an event, dinner, gathering. I really do not know the answer here, I look like the bad guy if I inform others I do not want myself on there so I lose and know no way around it. More and more I feel the only privacy that exists is between my ears.
Being anonymous or more likely pseudo-anonymous is very undervalued. I think there is already a trend but in the future people are likely to have many pseudo-anonymous identities and one public one with as few data possible and as curated as possible.
I think a big part of this is consent. My kids know I post their photo on Facebook/Instagram. They pick which one, and even tell me to "like" it after it's posted.
It brings up the question of how old they need to be (my kid was about 3-4 when she started telling us to put up her photos). But I guess we can always remove it later, and just don't put anything embarrassing up there.
How can a 3-4 year old give meaningful consent to having her biometrics irrevocably recorded by one of the world's most aggressive and pernicious surveillance corporations? How fully did your kids understand all the implications of posting photos on social media before you agreed to do it?
> But I guess we can always remove it later
No. You can't. Maybe you can ask FB to stop showing the photo to other people, and maybe they'll comply, but FB will still retain it and any data derived from it (e.g., facial biometric data). Other people could have saved that photo and could re-post it at any time. Or FB could have a bug and that photo could resurface.
Once something is published on the www, there are no backsies. This is something every parent these days needs to impress upon their children. I'm honestly shocked that you, fellow HN poster, need to learn this lesson, too.
I made an X.500 OSI directory services entry for my eighteen month old child. This was in 1993 twelve years later he had to ask me to try and delete it. It was still popping up in searches for his name and he didn't like it. It was remarkably hard to erase since the quipu directory was basically offline then and the data only existed in Wayback style archives.
It's almost unimaginable that a 14y/o is so wise. I was going to yell "Fraud!" but Fast Company seems trustworthy and the last sentences suggest it really was a 14 y/o. Amazing, when I was 14 I was like an 8 y/o compared to this girl.
I support this, and when I have children i know family will be asking for photos. The plan will be to host a blog and link them to photos, for ultimate control of who has photos of my offspring.
I respectfully disagree. Children have a right to their own privacy from the rest of the world and it is a parents' responsibility to respect that. My son is only 11 months old but neither my wife, our family/friends, or myself post pictures of him or any intimate details on social media. They can be shared privately but not on social media.
I think it goes even deeper than that. I firmly believe in my own right to privacy, but as an adult, I also have some understanding of the consequences and implications of my actions, and this informs what I do, and what I share.
Children do not and cannot have this luxury. They should not be held responsible for their choices and actions in the way that adults are, and a part of this is ensuring that their life is not documented with the level of permanency that is inherent in the internet.
Good point, I should have said "responsibility to ensure that" instead of "responsibility to respect that". Parents have the responsibility of protecting their child's privacy.
Okay. Well then parents can go through and delete photos their kids want removed from Facebook.
If the parent's Facebook is private, that'll probably be the end of that.
Since I'm perfectly willing to do this for my child once they're old enough to form opinions about their own privacy, I don't see the problem with sharing photos of them to my private network while they aren't.
Yes, I'm sure "I'll delete it now if you want" will completely negate any feelings they have about the fact that you've already broadcast those things to hundreds or thousands of people (and a massive advertising corporation that thrives on the exploitation of personal information) for the last 14 years.
Okay, so first, I completely disagree with your conclusion; there's absolutely things from my childhood that I wouldn't want on the internet even today as a grown adult. Not because I imagine they're uniquely embarrassing and would somehow damage my "current persona", but simply because they're a part of my childhood and my person, and it would be an encroachment of my privacy if they were publicly available. It's one thing to show your relatives and neighbors pictures of your children and their drawings; it's another for them to be irreversibly published on the most public platform in existence.
Second, which I'd argue is in fact more important, do you realize how damaging it can be at age 14 to experience this sort of betrayal of trust and elimination of privacy? It's as if the bully in your class got to read your diary aloud - times 100x. The content doesn't really matter, the transgression of boundaries does. And of course you might laugh about it once you gain the distance from your past self and its worries and pains, but it doesn't make the event any less exposing and possibly traumatizing. Adolescence is a brittle time in the development of a personality, and the kind of experiences one has aren't any less impactful because they're "just kids".
I have colleagues on Facebook who post literally everything their kids do, which means it's out there for everyone to see, and it will never die. God forbids Facebook gets hacked too.
It annoyed me when I was a kid that my parents were just babbling about everything I did to family, and the internet didn't exist back then. The thought of what they'd have done if I was a teenager today... ugh.
Ill never advocate for parents to never do ANYTHING that makes their kids uncomfortable...that's just part of growing up. But putting it all on the internet for their 750 facebook "friends"...no just no.
>It's not like her mother did anything specially wrong, e.g. posting the letter to the tooth fairy, and so on.
Not sure if it's really "not wrong". There is a growing notion in Western society that kids are actually people and have rights, and not just their parents' trinkets. Would you like someone to share your correspondence on social media, even if it's misaddressed? Or post your naked pictures without your consent (which kids can't give yet)? I suspect you'd mind very much, and no amount of rhetoric like "you're only upset because you're not enlightened enough" will change your mind. Why is it OK then when parents do that?
In France, it is legally wrong, as you cannot share a pricture of somebody without consent. That will be interesting in a few years (very soon, actually), as some young adults are pissed off by the pictures of them their parents shared for cheap facebook karma.
>In France, it is legally wrong, as you cannot share a pricture of somebody without consent.
Wait, seriously? I need to move to France ASAP. I hate the fact I can't participate in any kind of event without assholes taking a ton of pictures and posting online.
I don't know this girl or these people, I'm quite a few generations older than 13, and it's embarrassing to me even reading about it. I hope - and believe - my own offspring would seriously cut me off if ever I did such a thing. At least that's the way I raised them.
If when I was 13, I discovered that my parents had erected billboards within sight of all of my fellow students with pictures and text describing all of the childish things I had done in the previous 12 years, I would have been mortified.
This is essentially what posting things to a public facebook profile is, and while I find it understandable that parents would do it without thinking, I find it horrifying that someone would defend it as "not wrong" with the benefit of hindsight.
She said her mom and sister's profiles were public. I think that's definitely cause for feeling betrayed and very different from having a private profile and sharing with friends/family.
I had this same reaction, as a parent with one tween, and one soon to be tween who are both active on social media already. My wife isn't one of "those" Facebook moms who posts everything, so I could understand if the author had a mom like that, but she does share photos of our vacations, and other moments of our child's life with a close circle of friends and family.
Do we think this is maybe more of a mom trait than a dad trait? I know I have posted maybe a couple images of my children (2, 7, and 11) over the last 11 years. My wife on the other hand posts at least twice a day with images and quotes. I wonder if woman sort of use Facebook as a sort of "shared" baby book for their little cubs?
Twice a day? Don't want to be offensive but that seems very excessive. Even for people I know on Facebook that post regularly their kids' photos I think the maximum I see is once a week. I'm not from the US and don't follow that many people so that might be why.
She quits social media and writes a public article in traditional media so that people can talk even more about her?
Is this her idea or the idea of her mother who probably is friends with someone working at fastcompany?
I'd be interested to find out how a "random" 8th grader got to write an article for fastcompany and if she or her family has any ties with anyone at fastcompany or even Mehta, the editor.
Also, couldn't this also be viewed as fastcompany exploiting an 8th grader for money and agenda? And is this girl's parents any better than the social media parents?
The internal contradictions and hypocrisy in this article is quite something to behold.
I'm hopeful that in the next several years there is a pushback against social media and the idea that for an experience to be valid, it must be shared. There's something to be said for having an album of photos that you pull out a couple of times a year to show a select group of others. It makes the experience much more valuable than blasting out content for everyone to see.
Makes me think that Gen Z is much wiser than the Millennials. People coming of age today are much more cautious than those who did 5-10 years ago (lots of drunken party photos on Facebook, etc). They understand the consequences of having information in the world that never goes away.