A fascinating insight. I imagine my data would show similar trends as my children were born. Magical times indeed.
One of the things I've struggled with (and my brother too) is that it is incredibly hard to resist the urge to share personal information on the internet concerning your children, whether that be their names, experiences, videos or photos.
My brother and I came to the conclusion that we should not leak information that could diminish our children's privacy, as they have no power to say anything for or against it.
Rather we would refrain completely from divulging any personal data about them, full stop. It is hard though to resist the temptation. You want to shout from the rooftops about the day your child started to walk, or the first time they said 'Papa', or share a video of their first steps.
However, our conclusion was that if we put ourselves in their shoes, we would be disappointed that we did not have the opportunity to have our say on the matter. We have their trust, even though they don't realise it yet.
So, with the inclusion of social networks like Facebook, we have not shared any information about our children. I don't know if it is the right decision, but I can only hope that not doing something is better than doing something and not being able to take it back.
We live in a world that is vastly different from the one our parents grew up in. Privacy today is like gold dust. I hope the next generation can turn the tables on the all seeing eyes, but I fear we have done too little too late.
We have come to a similar conclusion, with our first. This is really hard since, as has been echoed, these really are magical times. I'm wondering, in what ways have you shared with family the most?
We also decided the same, although to be fair we were going down that path anyway (neither my wife nor myself use Facebook or LinkedIn, Twitter is strictly professional). I'm setting up a private server with a photoblog which will be password protected right now, but it's sufficiently annoying to do that our daughter is now 6 months old and I still haven't finished it. We talk to our folks a lot via Skype and we do send some via Google Drive, but never shared publicly.
I've also started mailing prints of photos we really like, which is awesome, I totally recommend it.
I have to commend you (and people like you). Others who share almost everything about their kids, not knowing or not caring about how those could be used and abused, are just making money for the social networks. It's like saying "here, use my baby freely to make more money for yourself" with worse side effects that are not yet known clearly for the masses.
The parent didn't say they are some top level secret. Just that, as infants, they have no say in how they are portrayed to the outside world. Adopting a conservative rule here is reasonable; how many times have you heard people say "I wish my parents had shown my baby pictures to more people!"
Besides, the last thing the internet needs is more baby pictures. The baby picture is the human equivalent of the "what I ate for dinner" picture: everyone who comments will say how awesome it is, but nobody really cares about how cute your baby's bottle is or how spicy your curry was, and everyone realizes that it's just a form of attention seeking by the poster.
So if I took lots of pictures of you and published them on the internet you wouldn't mind? Maybe you don't, maybe you do, but shouldn't you have a say in that?
I might be tweaked if you published a bunch of pictures of me sitting at my desk at work or whatever (because you would be a creepy stalker), but I would not be unhappy in the least if you developed a timemachine, went back in time, made friends with my parents and started posting my baby pictures to future-facebook.
The things that babies and children do vs. the things that adults do are not comparable. Leaving aside, it's darn hard to reliably recognize people from their high school photos when looking at their older selves and next to impossible for babies.
Further, if that parental photos and publishing those photos somehow violates the child's rights, I would say that children have virtually no rights and what rights they do have their parents can exercise on their behalf, regardless of the child's opinion.
Even further, what plausible harm could come from a picture of a kid in a tub, for example?
"Even further, what plausible harm could come from a picture of a kid in a tub, for example?"
Knowing the kind of data mining that occurs with text, one would only expect that future mining would occur with images as well. So what happens when all public images of you from birth to present are indexed and used to make decisions about you? For example, what would happen if you tried to get health coverage and the company could look into these indexed images for all contact with known carcinogens to determine your ability or cost for health coverage?
I think your specific example is likely to end up so heavily regulated as to be impossible. I'll go so far as to say that most harmful uses of data mining will end up with laws to mitigate the harm.
I think the likeliest 'harm' is that companies will be able to tailor really effective ads targeting people at earlier ages.
Besides, the information asymmetry between private people and entities with large amounts of data already exists. Your kid's pictures are a matter of degree and will likely not make a difference.
Heck, I'll argue from the other direction. In the future, having large amounts of harvestable data will make most people better credit risks. Those with heavily censored profiles will be analogous to present day people who only use cash - unable to get loans or what have you.
If your insurance company is image-mining and unable to pin down your past risks they will simply do the same thing they do today. Assume the worst and place you in the high risk pool until they have enough data to prove otherwise.
I read this right after yesterday's article about Chris Knight, "The Last True Hermit". In particular, this part makes an interesting contrast with the quantified self movement.
> "But you must have thought about things," I said. "About your life, about the human condition."
> Chris became surprisingly introspective. "I did examine myself," he said. "Solitude did increase my perception. But here's the tricky thing—when I applied my increased perception to myself, I lost my identity. With no audience, no one to perform for, I was just there. There was no need to define myself; I became irrelevant. The moon was the minute hand, the seasons the hour hand. I didn't even have a name. I never felt lonely. To put it romantically: I was completely free."
As the father of a six day old I can't but wonder: Is this guy totally checked out in the care of his son? How can you have a newborn baby and not be waking up at all hours of the night?
I'm a father of a 5 month old. My wife and I had an agreement in the first three months. She took the night shift. (I know she's awesome.) And I'd get up with him in the morning and keep him out of the room long enough for her to get some solid sleep. This was particularly important because we were breast feeding and had to build up a supply for daycare.
Also, I assume this guy doesn't get on email when his son wakes him up in the middle of the night. It's not what I want to do at 4 am, I don't know about you.
So there are many ways this can happen, his wife stays at home. He doesn't log when he wakes up. Whatever arrangement he has with his wife it works for him and it's not our place to judge.
I wondered that as well, actually. Lots of folks seem to be able to arrange for help but when my son was born it was just my wife and I. Our families were not able to help in any meaningful way. So we slept when the baby slept, were awake when the baby was awake, and traded care in shifts as much as possible. This fellow may be lucky and may have some additional help. In my case, I usually had the 2-6am shift.
His kid is very cute and looks quite alert! So whatever the care is I would say it's working fine for them. Didn't see any photos of the parents.
A lot of people sleep in shifts, wherein one gets a full night's sleep during what are considered "normal" sleep hours (like 10-6) and the other gets additional sleep after (10-6 with interruptions, then 6-9 uninterrupted.)
Also, some babies sleep through the night starting pretty early. Ours was maybe 4-5 weeks old when he started sleeping through the night consistently, or needing attention once during the night at most. (I sleep worse now that he's 4 1/2 years old. He gets up at 3am and wants to LARP 2048 with me. "I'm 512. You're 512. We make a 1024!!!")
So we're not allowed to call people out when they are in fact being asses. (And this was originally intended in the donkey sort of ass way, indicating rudeness.) This seems amazingly arbitrary.
One of the things I've struggled with (and my brother too) is that it is incredibly hard to resist the urge to share personal information on the internet concerning your children, whether that be their names, experiences, videos or photos.
My brother and I came to the conclusion that we should not leak information that could diminish our children's privacy, as they have no power to say anything for or against it.
Rather we would refrain completely from divulging any personal data about them, full stop. It is hard though to resist the temptation. You want to shout from the rooftops about the day your child started to walk, or the first time they said 'Papa', or share a video of their first steps.
However, our conclusion was that if we put ourselves in their shoes, we would be disappointed that we did not have the opportunity to have our say on the matter. We have their trust, even though they don't realise it yet.
So, with the inclusion of social networks like Facebook, we have not shared any information about our children. I don't know if it is the right decision, but I can only hope that not doing something is better than doing something and not being able to take it back.
We live in a world that is vastly different from the one our parents grew up in. Privacy today is like gold dust. I hope the next generation can turn the tables on the all seeing eyes, but I fear we have done too little too late.