I've been telling people for over a decade that my reason for not wanting my photo taken is because a piece of your soul gets taken away into that photograph and if it's uploaded to the internet, it's lost in a virtual world forever. Yeah, it's a joke, but it seriously gets more acceptance and understanding, and less scoffing than telling people I really don't like my face in the corporate surveillance panopticon as much as I can avoid it. There just isn't any point in feeding that nonsense, on the other hand people are very quick to dismiss anything that sounds like paranoia from anyone. The logical solution I've found here is somewhere in the middle because apparently nobody dismisses people's spiritual beliefs. The result is that people respect my wishes to not be in photos.
> on the other hand people are very quick to dismiss anything that sounds like paranoia from anyone
It takes willful blindness at this point not to comprehend how bad the panopticon is for us, and that's before even venturing into more conspiratorial analyses of the real purpose of all this infrastructure and what it's meant to be used for. I've noticed these dismissals will often take the form of a sort of learned helplessness/powerlessness, i.e. "they already know everything about me, so why wouldn't I just hand over my retinal scan, DNA, and images of my private moments?" It's just a method of coping with the subconscious recognition of how bad the situation has become.
I think we're already in an age where you can maliciously clone someone's likeness to commit petty fraud. That's really the threat model I'm working with here.
It's interesting how much it parallels the novel 1984. The members of the party lived under extreme surveillance and control for what?
My analysis is that the outer party traded off those things effectively for a sense of safety, and the inner party traded off even more for pride. In total the party was only about 20% of the populace.
At any point Winston could have left. The party had obviously created an oppressive wartime environment that made it scary to leave the safety of the party, but Winston had many opportunities to simply walk away.
But he was invested.
And I think that's the parallel I see in modern capitalist society. We're so invested that we cannot imagine walking away. Disposable gadgets, next-day shipping from the comfort of your couch, virtual social scores (either crowd sourced or provided by your ruling party). These things all feed into the sunk cost fallacy that starting over would be too hard.
And maybe it is. Maybe that's why I keep marching with the herd.
Winston knew. The plebs in 1984 lived in blissful agreement with whatever the party put out. They were ignorant and held their oppressive government's rhetoric as lighty as a feather in their minds.
Winston knew what it was really like, he knew what the party could do, he knew how little influence he had over his life in the final accounting.
The fear is hollow. The knowing is what got winston.
In contemporary life it's not as clear cut. We want the benefits of tech without the tyrannical control over us. You can't leave or stay to solve it. You have to work hard for a long time to create the boundary against tech that isn't tyrannical, under difficult resourcing conditions and the deck is stacked against you.
The gov doesn't need to be blanket oppressive like 1984. It can be freedom loving for 98% of policies and ram home the 2% that matter to their plans for world domination or whatever.
Every business owner gets to choose to install face recognition cameras or not in their business, sure, freedom. And the government puts them on the streets and in stadiums without public involvement, making any choice about partcipating in the program null and void.
The gov is expert at bullying it's own people, freedom for society's ownership class, and freedom for the gov to do whatever it wants, too.
We only ever explore the book through Winston's eyes. He FEELS trapped and scared, but how could the party possibly prevent his escape? The fields had microphones, but he wasn't GPS-tagged. Part of the purpose of the panopticon is that people don't HAVE to always be monitoring, but you never know if they are.
But I still assert he could have left. The fear just worked too well on him. Just like it's working on me. I'm too scared to quit this life and start a new one.
He didn't just feel trapped and scared in the book. There was also depiction of him and Julia being kidnapped by members of the Party when they rented a room above the shop. Winston was then tortured both physically, mentally, and emotionally - he never sees Julia again (from what I recall).
He does, they just don't care about each other anymore. By thr end of the book he has been permanently defeated, he could do whatever he wanted, and he didn't want to anymore.
> At any point Winston could have left. The party had obviously created an oppressive wartime environment that made it scary to leave the safety of the party, but Winston had many opportunities to simply walk away.
I started saying exactly this. In my culture, our elders used to say this about old fashioned photographs. Young people used to laugh about this.
Now I wonder if those elders were also joking, just didn’t wanted their photos to be taken.
EDIT: I still take plenty of pictures but not too many or share as much. Mostly don’t want my photo to appear in random places. My joke is that if you take too many photos, then you will lose your soul completely.
I was about to comment that I read some time ago about a certain Islam sect strongly discouraged photos of people because of that. Is that your culture by any chance? I'd enjoy hearing about it again.
I am not an expert in Islam, so some of what I say maybe completely wrong.
My parents are from Sunni sect which is the largest sect. But it is further divided into sub-sects. However, you can pick and choose various rules from different sects/imams. Which is good imo but it is hard to say which rule comes from which sect. (Also some of more conservative Muslims believe that their way is the only right way and they tend to push their views/rules).
In Islam, idolatry is a major sin which can render one to ineligible to enter heaven forever. All other sins are forgivable. This is agreed among all Muslims, afaik.
So all Muslim are very anti-idolatry but definition of idolatry varies among various Muslims. On one extreme, mere drawing/photo of a person or animal is forbidden just in case it leads someone worshipping that picture.
Some Muslims consider it idolatry when pictures of kings or leaders are treated in certain "respectful" or "ritual-y" ways. And that is one of the reasons that Muslims don't like pictures of prophets/religious figures as they are not sure how to treat those pictures.
Majority of Muslims, I know, don't think drawings or photography is forbidden as long as you don't perform any sort of rituals like lighting a candle or putting flowers.
As for capturing a part of the soul when taking photos, I don't think the most conservative Muslims who considered photography forbidden believed that a soul can be divided/captured like this. At least, the one I knew rejected this idea for forbidding photography.
The people who used to say that camera can steal a part of soul tended to be more moderate. Maybe there was indeed some moderate sect that believed this but I am not sure. Or now I like to think that it could have been a joke that went "viral" because some people don't like how they look in their photos (or they cared about their privacy).
I mean that’s not really the same thing though. One is due to superstition, the other is due to suspicion. How reasonable? Leave it as an exercise to the reader, but photographs could never actually steal your soul. Surveillance on the other hand could actually be conducted targeting you.
When people do want to take pictures of me in, I usually say I prefer not, but if I let them I say "this does not go on social media okay?" and it's never been a problem and nobody's asks me why I object.
A decade ago, I'd routinely ask wife's extended family to not upload pics of us to social media. I'd get the look but I think they respected it.
During hurricane relief trips I make a point of avoiding the org photographers and sometimes they'd made a point of cornering me. I guess they didn't want to miss anyone. When it got to that, I said there were warrants out for my arrest.
> photo taken is because a piece of your soul gets taken away into that photograph
actually this sounds much more like paranoia
then this:
> I really don't like my face in the corporate surveillance panopticon
which is more close to reality
> on the other hand people are very quick to dismiss anything that sounds like paranoia from anyone.
do they really? All they need is paranoia nicely wrapped into something more digestible and you wrote it yourself…
>Yeah, it's a joke, but it seriously gets more acceptance and understanding
So while one type of “wise” people are building corporations disrespecting people and using other “wise” people who help them without thinking … those who really get frustrated are photographers.
As to the joke about some part of the soul taken.
Photo is not taken. It is made. Preferably by someone who knows what he is doing and
it’s more like a part of the soul will be preserved to shine more. It is of course suggesting that subject has a soul in the first place.
I think telling people about Clearview, and pointing out that this isn't some fictional potential future maybe technology but something that has been happening for a long time now, is quite effective.
> a piece of your soul gets taken away into that photograph
This is a belief in the Amish religious community (if you ignore their wishes and take their picture they’ll generally look away from the camera to hide their faces).
"Amish believe any physical representation of themselves (whether a photograph, a painting, or film) promotes individualism and vanity, taking away from the values of community and humility by which they govern their lives."
or
#1. "The second of the ten commandments in the Bible says that we are not to have any graven images. And photos are kind of like graven images. Therefore we don't allow them."
#2. "We believe that having photographs of ourselves is being prideful, or at least it could cause one to have pride. And we teach and believe in practicing humility. So we don't want photos around to create a stumbling block."
and
"The truth is, most of the Amish do not care if you have a photo of them. They know that they are different from the rest of the world. And they are well aware of the fact that many people are fascinated and curious about them."
- You don’t need to be doing a PhD to realize that there’s something weird about sharing your intimate life stories online with strangers. Might be a bit crude, but you’d have to be pretty thick not to consider it.
- This part:
> Social media companies, these corporate giants that have so much influence in today’s culture and the way we connect with each other, are the ones normalizing oversharing and benefiting from it
This is not exactly accurate. Social media companies are not the ones normalizing this behavior, bad parents are. They do benefit from it or even encourage it, but ultimately it’s the parent’s responsibility as they are doing it only for themselves.
Bad parents are not the victim, they are the problem.
Is Facebook encouraging people to post pictures of their kids? If they are then they shouldn't be, but parents should also have the sense not to post them
In 2015 Facebook launched a feature (Scrapbooks[0]) specifically designed to encourage parents to upload and organise photos of their kids.
Their help centre still has an article under /help/scrapbooks [1] titled "Manage Photos of Your Child" with the first heading "How do I create a scrapbook for my child on Facebook?"
If Facebook's rules permit the posting of pictures of children then they are encouraging the practice. And governments are also responsible for permitting social media companies to allow such content to be posted publicly and permanently.
Yes, the parents should have the sense not to do this but the victims here are the children who can't stop their parents from invading their privacy. Many of them are now old enough to have their own social media accounts and discover what their parents did to them when they were younger. Presumably they aren't happy about what their parents did and I knew they wouldn't be back in the late 00s when this practice was first starting.
I mean, in a sense, aren't they? Not as specific as "post pictures of your two-year-old having a meltdown Right Now," but the whole thing with Facebook (or any social media) is that it encourages and rewards engagement.
When parents share about their kids online, in almost all cases I can think of, they are doing it for themselves, not for the child’s benefit.
i would disagree with that claim. at least when i share photos of my children the primary benefit is for my parents, my siblings, and very close friends. it is neither for my own nor my kids benefit.
the point of facebook is to stay in touch with your friends and family, and so it encourages to share with them. i am not on facebook myself, so i don't know how easy it is to create private family/friend groups. if it is easy then it should not be a problem to share family pictures in private, but apparently this is not happening and a lot of people are sharing in public instead? do they believe that only the friends that follow them can see them? never mind the privacy issues of facebook itself.
does it make sense to post it online instead of celebrating it privately with my child or face-to-face with friends
most of my friends and family do not live in the same city as i do. so face-to-face is not an option.
instead of chastising parents for using the tools available to them to stay in touch with their family, how about creating and promoting tools that allow sharing in a private and secure manner?
Ah... So if I let my 3-year-old great-grandson play outside too long on a cold winter day, then it's Mother Nature's fault when he gets hypothermia and frostbite?
So if Coca Cola marshalls tens of thousands of employees and hundreds of millions of dollars, bombarding you with advertising and marketing and subtle messages on all channels all day, messages crafted by smart people who spend their whole lives studying human weaknesses and how to exploit them, messages which normalise drinking sugar water at mealtimes, as a reward, at special occasions, as a treat, at sports events, while driving, with take-out, at home, at work…
All you have to do is chant “personal responsibility” and then there’s no imbalance and no unfairness and it’s all alright and everything’s perfect and it must be the victim’s fault for not being John Galt and immune to advertising like you think you are (but aren’t really because nobody is)
> immune to advertising like you think you are (but aren’t really because nobody is)
No one is fully immune to advertising but some people are definitely more resilient than others.
To study your example: we are all exposed to pretty much the same level of advertising from Coca Cola. But some of us enjoy it in moderation while others drink it until they are obese and have diabetes.
And regardless of if you drink Coke or not, some people will go the extra length to do basic exercise where as other people do zero exercise.
So yes, there is an element of personal responsibility
> "To study your example: we are all exposed to pretty much the same level of advertising from Coca Cola"
Not over time; they are like the Hydraulic Press channel on YouTube which crushes random things in a press, and keeps increasing the pressure until the thing breaks. Big companies will keep pressing on you until you break - they'll be there advertising in the morning when you wake up, at night when you're tired and suffering decision fatigue[1], they'll be in TV shows with product placement so you get memories of seeing 'people like you' drinking Coca Cola in various situations, they'll pay high status people in your area of interest to be associated with their product to influence you by The Halo Effect whether it's a sports star or an investor[2], they'll be on your children's morning cartoons and on the radio station their friends' mom listens to, and in the vending machines at their schools, and on-tap in the bars and restaurants, and branded on all sorts of unrelated merchandise, they'll be beside your commute on billboards, sponsoring your town's stadium and favourite events, donating products to your favourite YouTuber or lobbying your politicians in their interest. And many more than I can think up, and like The Terminator they absolutely will not stop increasing the pressure over time.
And it's effective, world obesity has tripled[3] since 1975.
Mexico has a problem with Coca-Cola, see [4] with quotes like "Coca-Cola “employs strategies to prevent, delay or weaken the regulations that restrict its activities”, the political magazine Proceso alleged last year".
> "But some of us enjoy it in moderation while others drink it until they are obese and have diabetes."
From [3] "39 million children under the age of 5 were overweight or obese in 2020." - it's good to know they're just lazy and indulgent and irresponsible infants and there's no systemic problem whatsoever.
From [4] "while making the [documentary on Coca-Cola promotional techniques] she met people who consumed large amounts of fizzy drinks who were unaware they had type 2 diabetes. “People who were blind or had limbs amputated often have no idea that it was due to their high blood sugar level,” she says." - it's good to know they weren't uneducated, lacking access to good schooling and doctors who can explain or the education to understand the explanations, or lacking alternatives like clean water[5], they're just irresponsible and that makes it fine for them to be ground up by the capitalism mill. "Buffeted by the dual crises of the diabetes epidemic and the chronic water shortage, residents of San Cristóbal have identified what they believe is the singular culprit: the hulking Coca-Cola factory on the edge of town."
"The plant is owned by Femsa, a food and beverage behemoth that owns the rights to bottle and sell Coca-Cola throughout Mexico [...] Femsa is one of Mexico’s most powerful companies; a former chief executive of Coca-Cola in Mexico, Vicente Fox, was the country’s president from 2000 to 2006." - all you need to be immune to that is Common Sense, it's just Common Sense, just resist the ever-increasing pressure for the rest of your life without ever failing and be sure to never object because it's your fault if you give in.
"In San Juan Chamula, bottled soda anchors religious ceremonies cherished by the city’s indigenous Tzotzil population." - but it's easy to go against your local religion, everyone does it, right?
"Many Tzotzil believe carbonated soda has the power to heal the sick. Mikaela Ruiz, 41, a local resident, recalls how soda helped cure her infant daughter, who was weak from vomiting and diarrhea. The ceremony was performed by her diabetic mother" - Humans definitely aren't subject to any inherent cognitive bias about correlation and causation or anything, everyone is rational - and if they aren't, it's their fault which makes it fine to exploit them.
But those religious people must be dumb why would they think of fizzy drinks as a religious thing? Oh this is why "Local health advocates say aggressive marketing campaigns by Coke and Pepsi that started in the 1960s helped embed sugary soft drinks into local religious practices".
"the Femsa spokesman [...] rejected criticisms that the company’s beverages have had a negative impact on public health. Mexicans, he said, may have a genetic proclivity toward diabetes." - lying, gaslighting. Just be a perfect lie detector, it's common sense, it's just common sense, self-actuate your way out of basic human millenia-old respect for those higher on social hierarchies.
"Ms. Abadía, the security guard, said she blamed herself for drinking so much soda. Still, with her mother’s health deteriorating, and having watched her father die from complications from diabetes, she can’t help but fear for her own well-being. “I’m worried I’ll end up blind or without a foot or a hand,” she said. “I’m very scared.”" - why doesn't she just stop? Giving up addiction is easy, just take responsi... oh there isn't any drinkable water, right, yes, still that's probably her fault too somehow.
Okay I feel bad for those people in Mexico. I don't live in Mexico though. I don't have a stake in what their govt or industry does. It literally just isn't my world and I don't have any stake or power on what goes on there.
Frankly it's suspicious that you had to go to Mexico to get good examples.
>oh there isn't any drinkable water
Okay well I live in the united states and we have drinkable water. So then what?
> "39 million children under the age of 5 were overweight or obese in 2020." - it's good to know they're just lazy and indulgent and irresponsible infants and there's no systemic problem whatsoever.
You're making up a straw man if you think I'm attacking children under 5 for not having personal responsibility. But yes, I do blame these cases on bad parenting.
> "Frankly it's suspicious that you had to go to Mexico to get good examples."
I did not "have to go to Mexico" to get good examples, first thing which came to mind was those articles about Mexico. The link about obesity tripling is from the World health organization.
Let's assume for a moment that you live in the USA - the USA also has a problem with massively increasing obesity levels, see[1] the CDC saying the prevalence of obesity has increased from 30% to 40% in the last twenty years. Before you say "nobody trusts the CDC after COVID", the National Institute of Health says obesity in the USA has tripled since 1960[3] from around 13% to around 42%.
In case you think the political connection is Mexican developing corruption, here's [4] The CocaCola company saying "Coca‑Cola engages in direct advocacy at U.S. federal and state levels of government to share information and perspective on our public policy priorities." and their most recent disclosure Q1 2023 includes specific lobbying issues "Water security, replenishment, restoration." Should "water security for CocaCola company bottling plants" ever come into conflict with "water security for citizens" you can guess which side CocaCola will be lobbying on.
> "Okay well I live in the united states and we have drinkable water. So then what?"
Drought.gov reports that 90 million people in the USA and 266 million areas of major crops are experiencing drought this week[5]. California, for example, pumps huge amounts of groundwater for growing almonds for export and when the ground collapses into the holes where water used to be, it compacts meaning the ground can hold less water in future, reducing the groundwater storage capacity. An NPR article[6] says "Upmanu Lall, a hydroclimatologist at Columbia University and a luminary in his field, has co-authored and led numerous studies that document the rise of contaminated drinking water in the U.S. He and his colleagues assessed a national data set of 17,900 water utilities and other community drinking-water systems, revealing that water-quality violations of the U.S. Safe Drinking Water Act more than doubled between 1980 and 2015" - this is general underinvestment in infrastructure causing problems like 150k people in Jackson, Miss. getting undrinkable water - a systemic problem because supplying drinking water isn't as profitable as supplying sugar water, so that's where the economy allocates more funds and more efforts.
In the UK, Thames Water is a supplier in London - by far the biggest and densest city in the country - and since it was privatised it's £14Bn in debt[7] - basically taken £14bn in loans to pay out to shareholders, underinvesting and cost cutting in providing the service people need, a story played out around the UK with £50Bn in debts by private water companies, echoing the systemic problems with clean water supplies in the Mexican story. Getting away from pressure of advertising but still talking about systemic pressures to increase profits and payouts more than to provide best service, pressures which companies have huge resources to crush individuals, which individuals have almost no ability to resist.
So then you've taken "companies are more powerful than individuals and humans have known cognitive weaknesses which companies exploit which is a systemic problem with advertising and manipulation around the world and accross all companies and in the nature of the economies we run" to "examples of CocaCola specifically, affecting a specific community in Mexico, using a lot of different influences at local and state level with many different approaches and methods" to "I have clean water so there isn't a systemic problem at all" which is a non-sequitur - "I don't drink CocaCola" is not evidence that advertising generally doesn't work, or a refutation of the idea that pressure increases over time, or a response to the inhumanity of industries which exploit human weaknesses for profit on a vast scale to the detriment of human dignity, health, society and quality of life.
> "You're making up a straw man if you think I'm attacking children under 5 for not having personal responsibility. But yes, I do blame these cases on bad parenting."
39 million cases of '''bad parenting'''. Don't question the system, this is all the explanation anyone should need, case closed.
Don't look at "How to 'magnetize' a baby [with sugar]"[8], how babies crying has a disproportional effect on adults, how 'getting people hooked early' is a trick to affect the rest of their lives used by cults and religions and others, how the adults are increasingly stressed which causes more bad decision making, by an environment where housing is for rentier profit, where vehicle ownership is mandatory after years of car industry lobbying and marketing rebuilding cities around cars, where manipulative marketing and lies "yes junk food can be part of a healthy diet [coughinmoderation]" abounds, where companies do things like buy up shelf space in supermarkets to put their products front and center, use manipulations such as putting a photo of a baby on product packaging to imply that it's child related or child safe, and increasing contrast and colour to make it look 'friendlier' 'more noticable', and etc. etc.
But no, blaming the parents is the important thing to reassure you; you're on top so there can't be any systemic problems.
btw. if you reply with something as empty as "I don't eat almonds" or "my parents were bad and I turned out fine", you're missing all the points.
To add to all of that, one of the biggest powers of advertising is normalizing a particular product in everyday life. This is evident in your given examples about local religions.
Coca-cola is an accepted and normalized aspect of daily life. Because of the extremely effective marketing - it is viewed as 'safe' and something everyone should have, so parents buy it for their children - despite the obvious and well-known effects as well as becoming subtly addicted to caffeine that is in them. The kids are being primed to become lifelong caffeine addicts.
Do you drink caffeinated drinks regularly? Have you tried going without them? It's a bitch.
While the world would be better off without Coca-Cola...from my PoV, all their advertising has nothing on an over-active 3-year-old who can melt down into screaming temper tantrums when he doesn't get his way. Vs. the temporary peace & quiet when he is playing in the snow in the back yard, and I'm watching him through the window.
It is functionally forced. You cannot live in America without a car except in a handful of cities. This was by design. It was a group effort of multiple companies, from the oil companies to the tire manufacturers. They've all lobbied to spend public funding on car-based infrastructure instead of public transportation.
Additionally, they brainwashed a significant portion of the populace to actively ridicule, harass, and even physically attack anyone who tries to live outside that "everyone must have a car, else they're a tree-hugging hippie and should die in a fire" mentality, or anyone who doesn't drink the "climate change is a hoax" kool-aid. Fuck the giant oil corporations right in the eye. Massive corporations (like "big oil" and "social media") manipulate minds on a huge scale, and they've trained both sides to be eternally at each other's throats so that they can fairly safely continue to trash everything in their quest for "infinite profits".
Honestly it's like there's an entire position to the argument that just does not recognize the agency of people.
They weren't people who decided to attack or harass others - THEY WERE BRAINWASHED.
If anything bad happens, it's the 10 billionaires at the top who poisoned them, every other human is a saint would never think to attack or harass anyone on their own accord.
Americans have started buying pickup trucks en masse, and it's a total coincidence that it happens to have become the most profitable sector for car manufacturers and a sector they've turned all their marketing to. It's all the people who free-agencied their way to the same conclusion which just happens to agree with what the car makers want, and it didn't happen in Europe where the laws about emissions and safety don't exclude small pickup trucks, and that's also a total coincidence where millions of people just free-agencied their way to the same conclusion as each other (but different to Americans).
You know how jaywalkers are at fault when hit by a car? Who do you think spread that idea around America? "Automobile interests in the US took up the cause of labeling and scorning jaywalkers in the 1910s and early 1920s"[1]. And that isn't the case in other countries. People who saw the same marketing messages from the same people to believe the same things, who would think it.
> People who saw the same marketing messages from the same people to believe the same things, who would think it.
Yes, except all of the people who don’t.
Let’s do a little experiment. Pick any 1 position or belief that I don’t hold and you brainwash me into it. Of course, you won’t be able to. Why not?
Edit: by the way are you even from the US? Or are you just speculating about what it’s like over here? Because the way you speak about jaywalking is completely alien to anyone actually living over here. Everyone jaywalks all the time; No one ever actually gets in trouble. And when cars hit people, it’s definitely the people driving that get in trouble
Mother Nature isn't systematically trying to get your great-grandson to play dangerously.
Facebook is specifically looking for what gets the most from their users, so if you insist on a nature reference then ophiocordyceps unilateralis would be… still wrong, but closer.
And also in this analogy the cordyceps zombie apocalypse already happened, but again, yes I do know it's a very weak analogy.
trying to foist all the responsibility onto victims is central boomer tenant so i doubt you are going to make much progress with "making sense" and "being reasonable"
> Ah... So if I let my 3-year-old great-grandson play outside too long on a cold winter day, then it's Mother Nature's fault when he gets hypothermia and frostbite?
Well... yes?
I'm struggling to come up with any definition of "fault" that wouldn't agree with your statement there.
It doesn't matter to us when nature is at fault for something, because we can't punish it. But where does the idea come from that when you get hypothermia, that might not be the fault of the weather?
There are no systems without the individuals that make it and propagate it. In this case it’s the parents who want to show strangers their children’s private moments.
I understand the concept of individual responsibility but you cannot absolve the individuals who profit from dangerous systems of their responsibility either.
I’m not absolving anyone, but it’s misguided and counter-productive to place prime responsibility on them. No one forced any parent to tout their kids on social media (or regular media) for klout and profit opportunities.
If you stop social media companies, shitty parents would find another way to sell their kids for promotion. Parents should learn that their behavior is wrong and stop doing it.
Additionally, even if you can’t stop social media companies, my kid still isn’t on Facebook because we don’t use Facebook or post her there. The power is in the parents’ hands.
The loophole is if some other parent takes a picture at a party or something that includes our kid and posts it. We try to mitigate this by telling The Facebook Moms in very clear terms that if they post pictures including our kid, then we won’t be doing anything with them anymore.
Most people in our circles recognize the social media is marketing for your personal brand, and use it responsibly. Many people in the wider world don't. They often see it as a way to share memories with other people or to save their memories, because free photo storage is a thing of the past and most people don't have more than 256 GB of hard drive space on their phone (their only computing device).
> Most people in our circles recognize the social media is marketing for your personal brand
Marketing for your personal brand? What on earth does that even mean? I can’t even imagine what “my personal brand” would be let alone how/why I would market it. Get me out of this narcissism dystopia!
This isn't really what I'm getting at and I don't really agree with the characterization. Saving memories and sharing with people you know is totally fine. That's very different from, e.g., monetizing your kids through short-form video.
Yeah, most people don't monetize their kids, but "likes" != monetization. You're thinking about a small minority of people who have the most serious version of this problem, but it is a lot more widespread than just people who monetize their kids.
> or to save their memories, because free photo storage is a thing of the past
Using a social network as a journal doesn't imply needing to post anything publicly. There are plenty of private Instagram accounts that people just use to save photos.
"Systemic" is a term made up to abdicate responsibility and/or create a bogeyman. It's more comfortable to blame "them" then yourself, either for why you can't succeed or for a societal problem.
Most of those individuals have a rather weak will, they are slaves of desires. At the same time a few individuals with a strong will and predatory mindset know how to push the weak crowd into a loop of addiction. Coca Cola is essentially a drug dealer, they even used an actual hard drug in the past to hook up customers; now they have to resort to milder chemicals to cause addiction. Fashion industry is another example: they use the desire to feel better than others or like others, and skillfully use that to manufacture a loop of addiction.
I was reading recently the story of Christopher Robin, and how using his childhood stories in Winnie the Pooh haunted to him for the rest of his life and made him a subject of bullying.
I can only imagine what it will be like for these kids once they're older with their whole story plastered all over Instagram.
It’s more that his parents were completely emotionally absent & preferred to (as he put it) “step on [his] infant shoulders” than have any substantial relationship.
The bullying definitely was real but his parents mental neglect probably contributed at least as much—if not more—to his trauma.
I don’t disagree, but I feel the need to share a small bit of anecdata for perspective:
My kids often say, “this is so cool! Can you get a photo and share it with our friends online?”
Of course, anyone can take that last sentence, render it in their own context without the availability of any details to conclude that I’m a terrible parent. But that’s kind of my point: parenting is partly about making informed, nuanced decisions. You never have the information necessary to make an informed, nuanced criticism.
It’s the responsibility of the parent to work on gathering their data. Not knowing any better is not the responsibility of the child, but the parent. I would accept this probably in the early days of social media, but there is mounting evidence now that parents who monetize their kids are doing it intentionally and willingly. It’s child abuse in my book.
They may be "normalizing" it, but they're definitely being "enabled" by the social media companies who create the actual "benefit" that drives the behavior in the first place.
It makes me think of the California Child Actor's Bill[0], and how it sets up "Coogan Trusts." The law requires the _employer_ to set aside money into a trust completely bypassing the parents. It seems to recognize that any amount of money injected into a parent and child relationship creates unique strains that do need to be considered directly.
They literally got psychologists working to find out via A B testing what is the most addictive! Of course it's their fault. It's incredible how many people on this site try to feel not responsible for all the damage the Facebook, Instagrams and TikToks of this world are doing, even though they are the ones writing the code.
> Bad parents are not the victim, they are the problem.
Enabling bad behaviour because it makes you money is quite literally exploitative and therefore reprehensible. But really, it is no different than what bad parents do: refusing to stop and consider they are not actively contributing to a better world.
> Bad parents are not the victim, they are the problem.
Parents make unwise choices in disclosing information about their children on social media. Certainly. One can debate whether it is for "Likes" as a measure of social capital or something else. But the social media companies and their symbiotic ecosystem have been anything but forthright about how they use the digital trail of such disclosures. The cohort of readers here understands it well; the wider world not so much. The dramatic asymmetry of information (what I know about their usage practices vs what they know about me and my children) virtually guarantees that I can't make a fully informed choice about what I disclose or whether I choose to do it at all.
When a few individuals out of a large group are doing it, then it makes sense to blame the individuals. When millions of people are doing it because a giant force is pushing them all in the same direction, that is more or less the definition of a systemic problem.
>they are giving their children’s privacy away for something as trivial as likes.
Generally speaking I'm sharing with friends and family ... there's more to it than likes when it comes to human social activity IMO. I feel like this post boils it down to too little.
As for the consequences such as cyber bullying. Is the idea here is some bully at school one day might find some other child's photo and that spurs the bullying?
That sounds like "hide your shameful pics someone might be mean" and IMO completely misses the whole bullying situation. That sounds like a horrible (and frankly childish) way to live life/ teach your kids.
This whole topic is often so generalized (how much sharing are we even talking about), driven by fear, that it doesn't make any sense and the mysterious consequences a sorta boogie man.
>Generally speaking I'm sharing with friends and family ... there's more to it than likes when it comes to human social activity IMO. I feel like this post boils it down to too little.
Agreed. Referring to it as a "dopamine hit" doesn't help. Those chemicals in our brains aren't scary demons to avoid. From the view of evolutionary psychology, they remain because they led to beneficial behaviors. In this case, social bonding. If my wife posts pictures of our toddler on Facebook, and my mom hits the Like button, my wife will get a small dopamine hit from it. If that were all that's going on, it'd be a good thing. I'm glad my mom can see my kid having fun. I'm glad my wife can bond with her mother-in-law.
The problem is social media companies making a focused effort to (1) exploit user content for purposes the user would never want, like building a profile for targeted advertising, and (2) specifically targeting the action-dopamine-repeat loop to maximize engagement.
For an example of an alternative that (hopefully) isn't as terrible, my grandmother has a digital picture frame from Skylight. I can send pictures to an email address for that frame, and they'll show up in the rotation. I get a "dopamine hit" when I receive an email saying she liked one of my photos, or when she tells me herself. Dopamine's still there, but the system doesn't suck.
It's kind of funny that there's an old trope of people showing friends or strangers slides from their vacations or pictures of their kids from their wallet and the friends kind of awkwardly feigning interest.
Not much has changed with social media. If I had to guess, many people that get pictures of kids shared with them like and comment out of politeness, not genuine interest. So I don't get why the collateral damage of also sharing those pictures with Mark Zuckerberg and various ad companies is worth it.
I have many good friends and family members that I now live 1000+ miles away from. I might go years without meeting up with them face to face. Sharing photos and experiences helps to keep us closer than we might otherwise be.
I also think there’s a huge difference between scrolling through a few dozen pictures on my terms vs being trapped in a slide show in someone’s home.
When people have a reason to pick a bone with you, you're gonna have a really bad time if too much private information about you is online.
It's not so much the bullying part itself, it's people documenting you as a person and picking apart everything you've shared to paint you as a character. People online are absolutely rutheless, there's entire forums and communities dedicated to documenting people they find interesting.
The internet is not a safe place, and it never will be, no matter how much the big social medias want you to feel safe sharing your most intimate moments to an audience of literally everyone on planet earth.
I really messed up on this early in my step daughters life back when Facebook was the dominant platform. Posted all kinds of stuff. Fortunately for both of us, she was self aware enough to express discomfort with the idea once she understood what it meant. I stopped posting stuff without her express consent after that but I still regret it. The point is, don't do this to your kids.
Unfortunately for me my parents don't at all see the issue in sharing photos they take of my daughter on the social platforms they frequent and think my concerns are overwrought. She's young enough now that it isn't a major issue, but when she's older and her face is going to be more like the one she'll spend the rest of her life with, there's going to be a big argument about it.
They almost certainly value seeing their grandaughter more than they value having facebook accounts, so you have a lot of leverage over them if you feel strongly about this. Threaten to cancel your future trips to visit with them if they don't knock it off. Explain your reasoning of course, it's not a response you want to take but your daughter's safety and privacy come first.
i raised you. you have no business telling me what i can or can't do.
ok, hopefully most people have a better relationship with their parents, but i do think for many it does come down to either being able to explain to them the dangers of social media so that they get it, or accepting their parents actions, because threatening your parents that they can't see the kids of they don't stop is in most cases not a healthy move.
that is not what this subthread is about. this is about the question whether it is reasonable for me to threaten my parents to not let them see my children if they don't stop posting photos of them on facebook against my wishes.
to me a good relationship with my parents is more important than staying out of facebook.
what's more, at least in germany, grandparents have a legal right to have contact with their grandchildren. i would have to convince a court that posting pictures on facebook is so harmful that this right should be revoked.
I understand your position and sorry if I have caused offense.
I guess we just see things differently. To me a "good relationship with my parents" involves mutual respect of boundaries. It shouldn't even get to the point of threats.
I understand that for some and maybe even yourself this may be an unlikely outcome or you might just think it not worth the effort on this particular issue given how pervasive social media already is.
well yes. what is the outcome for my children if i do not allow them to see their grandparents?
to me, a good relationship with my parents (and inlaws) and between my children and their grandparents is more important than preventing any photos made of them.
You know the situation better than any of us here so trust your own judgement.
However, it's more than just preventing photos. It's about respecting boundaries. At some point your parents need to respect your authority in your children's lives. They're your children, not your parents children. Ultimately you are responsible for their wellbeing. They should be supporting your parenting, not undermining it.
This, obviously, is one issue among many, and may not be representative of a broader pattern. From your hesitation it sounds like this is one disagreement in an otherwise healthy dynamic. Again, you know better than us. But if it is a pattern, I encourage you to play that pattern forward. If your parents don't respect your boundaries, what does it look like if your parents don't respect your children's boundaries as they grow?
we seem to have different priorities. to some here it seems of primary importance that their parents respect their boundaries. to me, forgiveness, tolerance and a healthy relationship with my family is more important, and my boundaries that i don't want violated are much tighter.
My parents had several issues with boundaries on this point, and in the cases they are allowed to see my kid, they are not allowed to take pictures. Pictures must be taken with my wife or I's phone.
What was the timeline, if you don't mind me asking? When and why was your wife skeptical of social media, and when did you truly start understanding her concerns?
Same here. In terms or privacy it's one of the easiest things you can do to give your kids a fighting chance early on. We still do regular photo updates over a messaging app not owned by Meta.
How do you deal with family and friends wanting to post photos of your kids? The societal norm sadly seems to be that privacy invasion of this form is completely acceptable.
I keep an eye on it, if a photo of my kid pops up I get in touch with them and say do you mind not putting that up, we're not putting him on social media until he's old enough to choose for himself. It's been received well so far, people seem to understand our objections even though we don't offer any more explanation than that.
Well, I certainly wish this was my situation. I hope it stays the same for you. Your friends and family sound more tech-literate and -disciplined than mine
I posted a short clip of my son dancing on Tik tok. It went viral very unexpectedly (I don’t make content about my personal life). With over 1 million views, I was riding high on that dopamine hit. However, someone reached out to me about the topic of not only my son’s privacy (he was only 2 at the time) and even worse, the fact that predators anywhere could now see the video.
I don’t care if the next one would have gotten 10 million views. I deleted that video and immediately made a follow up explaining the situation to the thousands of people that had followed me from that one video. Your child’s safety and right to future privacy should always be the forefront, and I’m ashamed to say I even slipped up one time. Don’t post that stuff. Send it to your family and move on.
>the fact that predators anywhere could now see the video
I've seen this worry expressed before, but I don't understand it.
Do you feel like your son is more likely to be a victim of a given predator that comes across the video because it went viral? Or some other consequence?
That doesn't seem likely at all considering sexual assault or similar IIRC is usually done by someone you know already.
No, meaning that any predator can save a video of my child for viewing any time they like. I don’t mean they’ll be preyed on, I mean they’ll be viewed outside of the context I wanted my children viewed in. It’s not always “oh look at this cute kid! That’s adorable!” It can become much darker than that.
There have been quite a few cases where content creators who have made their entire niche their children disabled downloading and follower counts dropped drastically. It may not harm my child directly, but I’d rather avoid making my kids someone else’s spankbank material.
I don’t really see a case that it would be good for them to mass distribute videos of their formative years, even if it isn’t directly harmful.
Holy HN interaction. You have kids? Look beyond your logic for a second. You’re saying “oh man, it really isn’t a big deal to upload videos of your children that strangers can beat their meat to, because they aren’t being actively raped.”
No matter how unlikely if it's getting millions of views it's probably happening at least once. And what's the benefit of leaving the video up? Dopamine? Fame? It's not worth it, I agree with the regretful parent.
My mum used to have a physical album of family pictures, most of which were hugely embarrassing. But, at least, I had some control who could view these. Some came into my possession after she died and I did not hesitate to destroy each and every one of them.
Calling something "embarrassing" leaves a lot of room for interpretation so I can't comment on your specific situation, but I have pictures my mom took of me as a baby naked, breastfeeding, etc and I would never consider destroying these. I also generally find it weird when adults consider something they did before the age of 5 or so embarrassing. Like you're a literal tiny child not responsible for your actions - nothing you do is embarrassing because very little is under your conscious control.
What’s so memorable or “heirloom” about a crappy or embarrassing picture of yourself taken by someone else? It’s not as if the relative lovingly painted it from scratch - it’s just a photograph.
Our family photos included one particular photo of me, a rear view holding a garden hose.
And it was extremely embarrassing, but not because of its subject matter. It was embarrassing because, for decades, my mother used it as a weapon against me. It was one of those things to emasculate and humiliate me for being a boy and for having a natural body. It was a way to tease me and implemented as a source of shame.
It was just another brick in the wall, of course, but unfortunately I didn't get proper access to burn it when I had the chance. It might still exist, for all I know. I may perhaps eventually get a golden opportunity for final satisfaction.
Folks, can I ask about your opinion on one particular case of child photos on social media?
Imagine a semi-pro photographer, focusing on childhood photography. The photos are of course not any candid moments, celebrating the kids birthdays or sharing their lives. It’s staged, often with professional lights, heavily Photoshopped, etc. Telling a “story” rather than showing the photographed person - they are basically actors. Clearly, FB et al. would be great for finding clients, or just sharing the work with people who enjoy this kind of art.
Do you think it’s OK to post such images, provided the parents’ give their consent? Do you think it’s OK to post such images of the photographer’s own kids?
EDIT: Should have mentioned that there's no reason to link the models' identity on social media. It's not captioned as "Picture of David Oberon, 6yo from Seattle" but rather "Picture of a little inventor, working on a cool new machine".
It’s a gray area imo, there is no way of obtaining meaningful consent from those children, even if they are your own, but in the same vein the photographs are presumably one-off and not strongly associated with their identity as they grow, causing the privacy aspect to almost become a non-issue in the long term.
IMO it is not OK because there are long lasting implications (some creepy dude comes to mind, but I digress) that could impact their lives well past childhood. And as a child they cannot properly consent, and I do not trust parents to look out for their kids best interests. It would seem history has supported this theory with lots of anecdotes haha. Again, just my 2c.
Great point, and ya that is a tough one. I will have to think on this but obviously the initial answer is no. I hate more regulation but I think protecting kids from enterprising parents is important.
My wife is currently 9 months pregnant so my social feeds are essentially just baby content. I appreciate all the content new mothers put out, but I can’t shake the icky feeling I get from some channels that will place the spotlight on the child right from birth.
One thing I really dislike is the pressure it places on young parents to do certain things that are entirely optional and arguably misallocation of resources.
Baby showers, gender reveal parties, pre-partum stays at "mom suites" in spas/hotels, all those Instagram moments that make people feel stressed and like they're not in the right income bracket to get into having a family.
Save your money, folks. Spend it on high-quality toys, books, childhood travel. Save money so you have to work less and can spend time together. That's what your child will benefit from.
We had a wonderful midwife who told us her secondary function was basically to reality-check parents on what gear, clothes, events, price points, etc. they actually need. Get the basics right, she would say, and deeply understand why they are basic and necessary, and otherwise save your time and money for stuff that matters long-term.
I’ve started sharing whatever I want to buy with my 70 year old mother. Her response to everything is the same - “all of this is useless, kids aren’t that hard to raise”.
Given that she’s raised four kids, I tend to believe her.
we was given the advise of do not bother to buy baby clothes until they start to grow out of "baby grows" (the basic all in one thing that babies typ wear) saved us a fortune.
No need for boys or girls clothes, the dressing up thing is really for adults
Frugal dad of two here (oldest is turning three in a couple of weeks).
Your 70 year-old mother is right. There really is so much useless shit for babies now, and very little of it actually solves a real problem that new parents have.
The rules of thumb for us are:
- Don't buy anything until you actually have an imminent need for it. Simplest way to avoid useless shit altogether!
- Where possible, get used on FB Marketplace or Gumtree. It's generally 80% cheaper than new, and you can resell when you're done to get the money you spent on it back. (Or, just give away to friends)
- Get products with less features, not more. When you're sleep deprived and stressed to the end of your tether, the last thing you want to do is work out how a whole lot of different attachments work. If you don't have a pram yet, the Baby Joggers are great at this. They do one thing (single-handed compact fold) and do it well.
A fantastic tip we were given was to thrift all of our son's baby clothing, which we did. We have a rule to not spend more than $3.50 on any article of clothing, which served us well for the first 5 months.
Now, he's getting bigger, meaning those $3 dollar pjs now cost $9, as it's more cloth to create, but the sentiment is still there!
Did they require you to enter your email to read? Or did they just ask you for personal information, let you decline with a single click, and let you get to reading the article?
Privacy is about giving people the freedom to choose how their personal information is distributed. Sounds like they are respecting your privacy.
I signed up because it's a topic that interests me, and I can't recommend enough a service like anonaddy, which I now use religiously to create a personalised email for everything I sign up for which can be blocked with 1 click.
> Privacy is about giving people the freedom to choose how their personal information is distributed.
That's one take, and I won't argue that it's an unreasonable one.
That said, if you asked me to describe the UX patterns I might expect to find on a privacy-respecting website, interrupting me to ask me for personal information probably wouldn't be on that list. I probably also wouldn't have expected to see the third-party tracking pixels from Cloudflare, Datadog, and Google, etc.
That's okay. It's not egregious, it's just a bit odd, like if you were reading Apache documentation on a site served by IIS.
I have no social media presence and i have no kids but I have an absolutely amazing dog who is the friendliest dog I have ever met. I used to wonder whether I should start a YouTube or social media handle to share the love. However I rejected the idea because it's so much stressful to get the perfect photo or video and it just ruins the whole experience of the interaction. I also realized I'm really doing it for myself so instead why not do something that will help the dog too - so now I'm training him to be a therapy dog and hoping he passes his test next month!
> it just ruins the whole experience of the interaction
Hit it on the head there. Taking photos takes you outside the experience. It's the reason I take very few photos when I'm traveling. (I can understand ppl wanting to take them in that context, but it does make your travel different.)
I don't understand why parents want to expose every facet of their children on instagram and TikTok. I have 2 children and I take pictures and record videos of them almost every day and I've never posted anything anywhere. In this day and age, privacy is almost a luxury and I want to protect theirs as much as I can. When they grow up, they'll decide how much exposure they want to have but that'd be their decision.
My biggest fear is their photos/videos popping up in wrong places. Heck, with instagram being used basically as a "flesh" market for women, there are parents dressing their toddlers in outfits that are for grown ups that frankly make me wonder if the government ought to remove their children.
There are some truly sick individuals out there and parents need to stay vigilant to avoid tragedies.
I’m not getting the arguments she is writing about. Predators: yes that is a risk, but it’s as much of a risk as walking outside. Child getting mad at parents for posting when they grow up: again everything has risk this is almost negligible risk because social media is so pervasive on society, they will likely understand why parents posted.
What I find wrong is parents just showing off their kids for likes, a occasional bday pic is fine but every freaking meal or play day is just screams, I need likes today
Correct - but that wouldn't make for a shareable viral article about privacy, because that's what almost every normal adult in the developed world believes and is totally normal.
One of my "Facebook Friends" posted details about his kid's medical issues. Who knows what will now be publicly-available when that kid becomes an adult.
This is a perfect example of how complex the situation is. On one hand there's a huge minus of the child's medical info available forever online. On the other hand, the parents can benefit in important ways.
* They need support from their friends, so they post on FB.
* They may need advice on choosing a course of treatment, finding a specialist, etc. Ideally you are already working with a competent doctor/team but that's not a given.
One example immediately comes to mind that took two years of "working the system" before an actionable and effective diagnosis was produced. That's exactly the kind of thing finding the correct community on a social network really helps with.
I agree about the privacy concerns but I occasionally share funny or nice photos of the kids on Facebook - for the purpose of sharing those pictures with friends and family, and with discussion and consent from them. These are not public posts. Not everyone is seeking a dopamine hit, they are just exposing a part of their personal life to people in their circle. I only have like 150 friends on Facebook, all of whom I know or have known in person.
Ya the article seems to imply that the ONLY reason a parent would be doing this is to get a dopamine hit from "likes". That's just out of touch and asinine. It's perfectly fine to share photos of your children for friends and family to see on Facebook. Of course, using your children as content for your own public facing Instagram or TikTok is totally different. But everyone already knows that, and it wouldn't make for a great article that you could get reposted to the front page of Hacker News or whatever other site.
I feel there are two kinds of people. The ones who derive happiness from posting online and the others who restrain from it. Baby isn't the provoking factor to exhibit the behaviour.
Beyond the actually privacy argument I think there is a social argument. If you don’t post photos on Instagram you will drive more (for want of a better word) ‘engagement’ in real life as your friends actually meet your baby/child in order to see what they look like. Hold of the digital snack and enjoy the much more wholesome reality.
I was sorely tempted to put my son's artwork on Instagram because since he was about 6 months old he had spookily incredible pen control and a sort of uncanny skill in design and composition. I just couldnt shake a sort of icky feeling that I'd be getting a dopamine kick from people liking his drawings, and the converse, that I'd be feeling hard done by if one drawing didn't get enough attention.
I really wrestled with it for ages because I was (and am) really proud and wanted to show off! (He's now less interested in drawing than in Lego so the moment has kind of passed.)
Had my first baby last year, and it struck me how often I saw this on social media. Especially on LinkedIn.
(I can remember one example irritated me to no end, some CTO posted a pictures of his wife working from home with two babies trying to play with her. Really poor taste IMO).
I can understand being proud and happy about the new arrival and wanting to shout it from the roof tops. But my logical side said "she's too young to decide if she wants her picture on the internet".
The absolute worst is when parents play mean pranks on their kids and film it to put on the internet. I think it's a petty asshole move to tell your kid you ate all their Halloween candy, and that it's selfish and inconsiderate to mine your children for video content that will be online for their whole lives. Imagine how little self awareness a person needs to have to combine the two.
When my eldest was born I posted the following note on my Facebook wall:
Today, I met you. My words cannot adequately express the hope and happiness you bring to your mother and I. After months of anticipation we are delighted that you are here and healthy, safe and sound.
Like all parents we want to protect you and nourish your individuality. Today I'm making a promise: your identity is yours alone to express.
In this digital era, we share more, more often. But that decision to share is not one we will make for you, we won't create an online presence for you. Only you can decide how you want to be seen by the world.
I later realised that I had posed this on the day they were born, revealing their legal date of birth. I screen-shotted the original, deleted it and then reposted it, adding the following quote:
I don’t share photos of my son online because he hasn’t consented to that sharing, and doesn’t understand what posting photos online means.
I have seen friends post photos of their children on Facebook/Instagram while potty training and in the bath. Who knows how much those kids are going to get bullied in middle / high school when a classmate finds those photos, makes a meme out of them or prints them out and posts them around the school. All because their parents were chasing a dopamine high from a few likes.
It's great to see kids like Gwyneth Paltrows' pushing back[0] against their parents oversharing very publicly, creating a great example for other kids, empowering them to stand up to their parents oversharing.
We've forbidden most people to take pictures of our youngest because we don't want his pictures online without his consent. My parents are still very mad about it.
We've posted or shared some limited photos but never ones that show his face.
That's silly. Straining your relationship with your parents over preventing anyone from simply looking at your child (which hundreds of people do when he/she is walking in public every year, and hundreds more will do by simply buying a yearbook when they are in school) is uncalled for. When you grew into adulthood did you demand your parents take down all of your baby pictures that they had hanging on their walls?
My kid, my rules. If my parents can't respect that, they aren't entitled to be involved in our family. Why on earth would I associate with people who don't respect us?
because they are your parents, and you should try to have a healthy relationship with them. (unless of course they mistreated you badly when you grew up, but then you probably would keep more distance than just disallowing them to take photos)
Is it a healthy relationship if they don't respect our boundaries? I think people may be projecting some very strange personal feelings about their parents on people they don't know.
Is it a healthy relationship if they don't respect our boundaries?
it's not, but that doesn't mean it is a good idea to just refuse them. unless the relationship is seriously broken, it is always a good idea to to try to work on the relationship with your parents and avoid making it worse. if this is the only issue i'd have with my parents, it would be better to try to resolve the issue instead of rejecting them.
I think people may be projecting some very strange personal feelings about their parents on people they don't know.
possibly, but i get the same impression from your message too. you may have reasons for your choice that are not visible from your post, which is fine for your choice. but because i can't see those reasons (and it would be out of place to share them here) i have to interpret your message based on the context available.
If you’re on this site you should understand the difference between physical vs. online access as well as the properties of digital data. They two are not in the same league.
Small aside on a personal pet peeve. "dopamine hit" is not really a thing. Dopamine in the reward system tracks the difference between the reward we expect and the reward we get (i.e. the prediction error).
No, that's just one of many "theories" about how this particular biochemical works, but it is not in any way a proven fact since we don't really know how the brain works in the first place, only what it looks like under certain conditions. "Dopamine hit" absolutely IS a thing though, because that term just refers to the fact that when dopamine producing areas of the brain light up in fMRI scans, people report feelings of pleasure. That's really all it means.
For a while, I followed the Holderness family on YouTube. They are an amusing North Carolina family of four who had a breakout hit when they dressed in matching pajamas and sang a Christmas song.
For a long time, their two young children were featured in all their videos, acting, engaging and interacting as a family.
Perhaps a year ago, first their daughter and then their son vanished from the videos, without much explanation. And I think that it sort of dawned on them that people may have viewed it as exploitative or unwholesome that their children had become, essentially, employees without much of a choice in the matter.
So while I miss their witty presence in the videos, I do commend the family on doing the right thing and letting their children be kids, off-camera, and perhaps when they come to adulthood, they can make a free choice to rejoin the comedy skits and music videos.
There are only 2 types of people who are interested in pictures of kids:
1. Their friends and relatives - it's easy to share those pictures with them privately.
2. All sorts of creeps.
My brother tried the whole 'don't share pictures of my kids online'. Lasted 2 weeks.
They started by sending private snapchat messages to our family. My wife screenshotted the cute baby picture, google uploaded it automatically to their backup/photo storage.
Game over.
Heck, walk into walmart, your face and your family are all scanned and added into their security database.
Its a fools errand.
I can think of few uses for privacy, overthrowing a government, embarrassing fetish, a medical illness that would cause people to treat you differently, yet none of those are showing your kids being kids online.
There’s a difference between “I don’t want any photos of my kids in a server anywhere” and “please don’t share pictures of my kids to other people unless we do it privately”, which your wife immediately violated by screenshotting an obviously private message.
What's weird to me is posting any of this stuff to social media. It's great to have family photos with the great grandparents, but why does it have to go on Facebook?
It goes on Facebook because that's how people communicate with a wider circle of friends. They don't care about the whole internet, but they want the friends that they do not see every week to stay involved in their lives. FB absolutely maintains those connections over years of minimal personal involvement.
You can debate whether that's a good idea. You can even debate whether you think the connection is real (but I think the feeling of a connection is enough to consider it "real"). You can certainly debate the use of these images in corporate machine-generated ads... but deal with the first paragraph: I think we understand why genuine people might still post on social media.
i do have kids and i make it a point to get to know other parents of my kids friends. they are not strangers. a stranger is someone who i meet once and never see again, or don't meet at all. parents of my kids friends or even any parents from my kids school are not that.
what bothers me here is that on the one hand we have this concept of stranger-danger, and on the other everyone is a stranger, just because you haven't talked to them yet? that doesn't make sense. calling the parents of my kids friends strangers just feels very wrong to me.
I don't see much difference between it being in a Google backup and being on the Snapchat server in the first place. The point of this article was not to say it should never be stored on a server, but that it shouldn't be posted in a publicly/large group of strangers accessible way.
