Children?s Privacy Threatened by BabyBlogs
Topic: Children and Privacy
BabyBlogs are web logs, commonly referred to as blogs, that parents put up about their children. Normally considered harmless in nature, parents often include pictures of their kids, along with a variety of stories. What they did on their summer vacation. A picture of baby bob with Aunt Eunice. These BabyBlogs have become the modern day version of the 1960?s slide show. The only difference now is that instead of inviting friends over to bore them to death in person for a couple of hours, we can now perpetually share our pictures with the world. Unfortunately, this has type of activity has a downside which may turn out to be most significant for some children.

When items get posted to the internet, as a rule of thumb you should assume that they will never go away. Even if you put them up on a website that you later remove, the images you post and the stories you tell have probably been indexed and copied by a variety of search engines. This means that they are probably still available to anyone who wants to see them, if they know where and how to look for them.

When parents post their own pictures, that's one thing. When they post pictures and information about their children, it is quite another. Parents need to stop and think before they do this.

Today?s children are having their lives documented like no other generation before them. Digital cameras have made photography much less expensive. And the internet has made digital photographs easy to share.

Before parents post content about their children, they should ask themselves it they would have wanted their parents to post similar content to the internet if that option had been available to them? Taking this thought process one step further, even if they would have liked to see themselves on the internet as a child, would they still want those old pictures to be available today? If the answer to any of these questions is ?no?, then parents shouldn?t be posting this kind of information to the internet. Period.

But more importantly, parents should consider that posting information on their children could cause problems more significant than just a little embarrassment later in life. Posting this kind of information of for the world to see can present immediate dangers.

If a pedophile gets their hands on pictures of children, and they like what they see, they may be able to find out who posted the images, and where they live. If an identity thief can find the name and address of a child, there is a perfect opportunity to steal that child?s name and ruin their credit record for life (Note: This type of identity theft is on the rise and it is usually not detected for years). In both of these examples, the perpetrator would never have needed to meet the victim prior to committing the crime. And it would all have been made possible by the victim?s unsuspecting proud parents, just trying to share their pride with the world through their BabyBlog.

by Jim Malmberg

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