#PSA: posting photos and videos of your kids online ensures they'll never be able to meaningfully opt out of privacy invasion.

80% of children have an online presence by age two, with parents sharing an average of 1,500 images before their fifth birthday. —2017, Northumbria University

By the age of 13, children have had an average of 1,300 photos and videos of themselves posted to social media by their parents. —2018, UK Children's Commissioner

#Privacy #DataPrivacy

@alice I'm always concerned, even when I share photos of my cats. Luck is that my black one never comes good, too dark for details in amatorial pics. The red one is so similar to any other orange short haired blonde striped. The red's sister is too elusive to have many pictures.

Put that aside: all this space, all this freedom in communication, and no privacy. No ethics is giving us respect. Someone finds the way to sell us and our dearest, like football stickers.
There's a criminal intent.

Like I added to my long post, there's a very good reason why release forms for class pics are a thing, one should be using the same reasoning for their family pics, that professional shoots like the aforementioned class pics use for release forms, and ideally no one should ever be putting their kids on a public stage while they're still minors and can't consent to it, period.

Don't put your kids' pics or vids online while they're still minors and can't consent to this shit guys, please. Let them make that decision for themselves after they turn 18 and can legally consent to doing so or not.

Oh, and one more thing, if you really want to take family pics, guys, do not use your fucking phones for this shit because as someone else pointed out, even if you don't put said pics online, Google or Apple will still back that shit up to do who knows what with it, instead use a dedicated still cam that has no online functionality, eg. like a used 10+ year-old DSLR, so you can keep your pics stored locally on an external hard drive or something and keep them completely offline, or hell, even use something like an Instax if you wanna go fully analog with it and keep a physical album around.

@alice

at one point, i came upon my ex's 16 yr old son filling out a web form with email, cell phone, and address. it was for an in-n-out coupon.

when i pointed out that they would bombard him with ads, sell his info to other folks who would do the same, his response was depressing but pretty accurate.

"every moment of my life since birth has been on facebook, the internet, etc. they a'ready have my name, email, and current cell phone. i can't prevent it, i can't get this back. but at least this way, i get a free burger."

this was 15 years ago. hopefully parents are thinking a bit more about sharing everything about their kids on the internet. it doesn't have to be this way.

@alice Well, look at the good^[1] news: if kids won't be allowed on the Internet before they're 18, they won't be able to find out that their privacy got abused before they were 13 until the five-year statute of expiration will have run out.

^[1] For the not-good values of 'good'. Got to commemorate the late great literal meaning of 'literally', after all.

@alice statistics that make me feel like i dodged a major bullet by being born in the early 90s. i at least got to be a teenager by the time my parents took up digital photography and social media.

@alice

Pretty sure that older millenials are the last generation to have that sort of privacy.

I even lost that one with some dumbasses taking pictures of a party we attended, and dumped on Facebook. No choice about it. Found after the fact.

@crankylinuxuser @alice zillenial here, I still have it

I’m also trans ofc, so my parents have next to no photos of me after I turned 11 or so (and to this day - while I’m ok with photos now, we also live in different countries so they don’t really have opportunities to take any), but even before that - my old photos exist only in print albums in our old flat, not anywhere online

ofc now I post photos of myself, but I’m pretty sure there aren’t any photos of me online that weren’t posted by either myself or my gf with permission

@aisling @alice I was always very very against being taken pictures of even before Trans:tm: and none of the adults ever understood why. “it’s just a photo” they always said

I was forced into being taken a picture of me in middle school for the whatever collage thing for graduating students (aka: everyone, because frade 1 to 9 is mandatory education in Taiwan and you legally cannot fail). I loudly protested against having my face in there. My mom complained with me, too. I went to every teacher I know, I went to the very people organising the collage, and they just wouldn’t let me have it. Someone literally said “you don’t have the rights to refuse”. I indeed do not, that doesn’t make you any less evil. I was particularly against it because that’s a public image of me that’s forever archived as long as my country still exists because it’s a public school.

Indeed, I was old enough to know that I had no legal rights to refuse because I wasn’t 16 yet.