Here’s a non-paywalled link to an article published in the Washington Post a few days ago. It’s great to see this kind of thing getting some mainstream attention. Young children have not made an informed decision about whether they want their photos posted online.
I really hope it becomes the new normal to stop posting everything about ourselves non-anonymously online in general. But especially photos and information about kids. I am hopeful that in the near future, we’ll all look back and say “What the fuck were we thinking? We all looked like narcissists exploiting our kids for likes!”
It’s crazy to me for many of the people in my demographic consider it totally normal to have all of your online social interactions tied to the same persona/user, using your real name, face, locale, employment status, etc
Stuff people do online is potentially public forever. WCGW?
There’s plenty of reasons to want to share images of your offspring besides chasing internet clout, and I find that simplification ignores all but the narcisistic fame chasers that will never care anyway.
Not making any judgement on whether any other reason is particularly valid. Just saying that the people who do it for likes are never going to see it as anything negative or exploitative. Better off talking with or working to stop the people oversharing for other reasons. Higher chance of success.
Still telling the fame chasers about the concerns is important as well even if it’s much less efficient
There’s plenty of reasons to want to share images of your offspribg besides chasing internet clout.
… I can only think of one, sharing photos with your family and a few select friends.
What other reasons are there?
Growing up at the dawn of the internet, this was considered normal. You stay anonymous online because you don’t know who the person on the other end of the screen is. What changed?
Normies got in and big Internet knew they could make money by having everyone give up all private information.
At our place we only share photos of the kids with grandparents/aunts/uncles via group chat. They’re the only group that “necessarily” needs to see the kids.
Let me guess, the group chat is WhatsApp or iMessage, so Facebook or Apple gets to see them too.
And their " legitimate partners"
Whatsapp is E2E encrypted isn’t it.
But the app is closed source, so you can’t know that Facebook isn’t intercepting it at either end.
Exactly, both end points are blackboxes compromised by Facebook.
Not even close—it’s Skype! We aren’t able to teach a 98yo great grandma to use something else from overseas, so Microsoft gets the cake.
Well its better that posting it publicly
Interesting how there are so many mentions of people worried about AI and only sharing photos in closed groups on Instagram/Facebook. I’m not sure that’s actually keeping the photos away from AI.
I think a large part of their concern is AI-altered photos generated by an individual.
The problem with posting pictures of kids in closed groups is that pervs will just join those groups because they have what they’re looking for. You’re basically making it easier for them.
It’s not that parents are afraid of their kids being part of a training set, though that is a bad thing in and of itself. It’s more about all of these AI undressing app ads that are showing up on every social media site, showing just how much of a wild-west situation things currently are, and that this brand of sexual exploitation is in-demand.
Predators are already automating the process so that certain Instagram models get the AI undressing treatment as soon as they upload an exploitable pic. Pretty trivial to do at scale with Instaloader, GroundingDINO, SAM, and SD. Those pics are hosted outside of Instagram where victims have no power to undo the damage. Kids will get sexually exploited in this process, incidentally or intentionally.
I believe by closed groups they mean the family or friends chat with like 5 people.
Although I personally wouldn’t share too much in those groups too.
Came here to say this. If you upload pictures to instagram, they are already being processed by Facebook (“Meta”). If you have an online backup of your photos Google/Apple cloud, then they are alredy being processed.
My mama taught me back in the day to never use your real name online. Now, multiple decades later, I laugh at people who are my age and just now learning that lesson.
Anything with your name on it should be very controlled and curated. Anything you said 10 years ago can and likely will be used against you.
I have not posted a single photo of my kids on any platform for this reason. My wife on the other hand thinks I’m overly paranoid, so thanks to her, Zuck has a ton of photos of them…
Here’s a real screenshot from Instagram.
Is that a porn genAI ad next to photos of underage kids? 💀
Yeah…
Oh my
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
A video to share with your wife
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I 1000% will
I share via Signal, and with links to my Immich instance (sent over Signal). Certainly susceptible to security problems since yours truly set it up, but what you gonna do…
Do you set up any Immich accounts for family members with shared albums? I’m currently using Piwigo but thinking about migrating to Immich. I wish the Immich app supported individual photo uploads instead of syncing whole albums.
Still on iCloud, Google Drive and OneDrive. No way these people know how to store photos offline on their phone.
I think it would be cool if there was more products that allowed this
My friends keep my photos offline too.
Anything that’s genuinely good, is good in more ways than just “for the children”.
Managing digital photos is quite hard to do reliably.
Where do you store them? Optical disc, it might get mushrooms; HDD, mechanism might fail; SSD or flash, this one’s better but it might get corrupted, and so on.
Cloud services provide a convenient solution to all this, than apart from the service going down (which is less likely) have no other issues. You can also access them wherever you are.
Privacy is an important concern. It would be nice to have them encrypted on cloud. Encrypted from a local and trusted (open source) client, that is also convenient. If each time I want to show a photo to my granny I have to download and gpg a file manually, I pass.
But most people don’t care about their privacy at all anyways, so why bother.
Encryption can brute forced
Of course it can. Go brute-force a quantum resistant algorithm with a reasonably sized encryption key and call me when you’re done.
You just got to be overly paranoid as it will serve you better long term
Just do backups, isn’t that easier than using a cloud service?
Sounds easy.
To make local backups I have to do them on schedule, transfer all photos (or rsync them) from all devices to backup media. To have some redundancy I have to make a copy (unless you got a RAID NAS at home that is). In this situation you’ll have a backup as recent as your sync frequency. To access the backups you have to browse the files on the drive, if it’s a NAS, it can be quite convenient, but not if it’s any other kind of storage.
Compare this to for example Google Photos backup. You take a photo, you have Internet connection, it’s synchronized. You don’t worry about redundancy, and can access the photo wherever you are with a very nice app.
These days I use Btrfs snapshots to do incremental backups to an external drive each week, it’s manual but it takes less than 5 minutes a week, the most I risk losing is a week of data and I trust it a lot more than relying on some external service that might go down at any time or randomly decide to delete my account. For most people just worried about photos I would assume that’s enough, I feel like anything else is just over-engineered.
That’s a very nice solution I will look into it. Thanks.
This is basically the method I use:
https://fedoramagazine.org/btrfs-snapshots-backup-incremental/
For most people just worried about photos I would assume that’s enough
If it’s not fully automatic I won’t stick with it
If you don’t care about privacy, you’re probably blasé about backup, but if you have backups it’s as simple as 3-2-1…
Optical disc, it might get mushrooms
Um… what?
I think they mean
Syncthing!
Android Phone/Linux/Windows/Mac/iOS clients. Simply sync your photos to all of your devices, if you only have the one device, use a trusted friend and cross sync…
Don’t bother with cloud.
Also Signal groups for sharing with those that matter.
I share my photos with friends and family using a normal webhost.
I used to upload my artsy photos to DeviantArt, but a year ago I had enough with how slow it had become, so I set up my own small lightweight website using a simple HTML/CSS menu and galleries generated by digiKam that also uses very light jacascript for navigation.
It is blazingly fast and private enough for me.
Until its used to train AI
Not to mention it is probably getting archived by the internet archive (no hate for the internet archive I think its a great idea)
Storing offline is great and all, but I hope everyone is storing on multiple disks at multiple locations…
Yer didn’t think so, I’m sure photos are being lost.
Everyone loses data once before they understand how important backups are.
For some of my acquaintances, uploading to facebook or sending them through whatsapp counts as backing up their pictures.
Yep. They don’t understand the down sampling.
If only that happening once was enough to learn from our mistakes.
No backup? No pity!
I use 23Snaps. Gated social sharing among your contacts.
Yes, closed-source, unencrypted and hosted by a party you can “trust”. Anyone can write that they are a parent and care for your privacy.
Here in Belgium it’s been pretty much the norm, both in friends groups or in institutions like schools that ask more formally, that one does not post photos online without the consent of all participants, including that of kids and their guardians. This is particularly the case for sharing publicly e.g Facebook post but also WhatsApp group.
It’s a mess but habits are changing at scale.
Is the internet scarier?
Or is it just millennials and “internet natives” having kids and more of them knowing better what the internet actually is.
I tell people to imagine a public place with everyone in it, the majority wearing masks or costumes. With constantly recording surveillance. Do you take off your mask.
Sure the mask is not perfect protection, and there are areas off to the side where people seem to not be wearing masks. But go ahead and choose a way to keep your kids safe.
On the flip side, search for “mom run” or “parent run” on Instagram to see the kids whose parents have decided to parade in front of thousands of people online. Usually moms posting their little girls in leotards and swimsuits for their mostly mostly adult male followers… 🤢🤮
But don’t worry, Meta isn’t complicit, if you search “child model” they give you a scary child abuse warning message.
Someone else on Lemmy pointed this out a while back, and after seeing it for myself that firmly solidified my decision to stay the fuck away from anything Meta does.
Why “run”?
Run as in “mom runs this account”.
“Mom managed” also gets results.
I don’t know whether to upvote or downvote.
I wouldn’t want the wrong kind of attention drawn here.
But I think if people have FB accounts that should look for this and report the fuck out of it.
I too am conflicted about having posted this info, but these accounts are already getting plenty of attention. Some have over 100k followers. I figure it’s better that people know how this works so they can oppose it, even if it risks helping a few new unsavory people to seek these kinds of accounts out.
I’ve tried my options at informing Meta about this issue, and unsurprisingly it is completely impossible to establish any meaningful contact with a company like this.
It’s weird the parents that are complicit in this, like how do they justify it in their mind? I had a girlfriend in high school whose mom encouraged her to post risque photos online in 8th grade, taking photos of her with her thong out posing seductively etc, she wanted her daughter to be hot. Maybe the parents are trying to relive their youth vicariously.
But you are right, worse than the random parents encouraging this, the platforms knowingly encourage this sexualization of children because they know the ad revenue it can generate.
I highly recommend reading “I’m Glad My Mom Died” by Jennette McCurdy, and watching the “Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV” Docu-series. It really helped me understand the mentality of parents like this and what they personally want out of it. “Reliving their youth vicariously” is a pretty good summary, along with the belief that making their kids famous will guarantee them a bright future.
But it absolutely exposes children to exploitation and abuse, and sometimes the abuse can be quite extreme.
