Until my kid is old enough to actually give me permission, in the form of a written contract, to use her real name and likeness for the promotion of this website, I will be refraining from doing so. From here on out my daughter will just be referred to as ‘One’ or ‘Thing One’, if another kid is born in the future, that child will be referred to as ‘Two’ or ‘Thing Two’. And as to try and keep it less confusing, when I’m talking about the number 1 or the number 2, I will use the actual numbers, even though it’s bad formatting.
When it comes to privacy, I have no problem posting pictures or the name of my kid on social media, since I’m only friends with people I actually know and I know how to set my privacy settings. But when it comes to the possibility of strangers reading the site and seeing pictures, I’d like to keep that to a minimum as best as I can.
It’s not that I’m really worried about pedophiles or weirdos grabbing pictures of my daughter or any of that, but it’s mainly because my daughter is too young to give me explicit permission to tell stories about her on the internet.
I don’t want her to grow up and be embarrassed by something I may have written about her when she was younger. So if I can protect her from that by just keeping this anonymous, then so be it. That’s really my main concern. I’m not concerned about identity theft or creeps, or anything like that because I’m aware of the things that we post about our daughter online and if you use basic common sense with what you’re posting, you’ll be fine.
I remember an old friend of mine (we’re still friends, just not as close as we once were), making a post on Facebook shortly after my daughter was born, about how she couldn’t believe that people would post the full name and birth date of their newborn children on to Facebook in the form of a birth announcement. It wasn’t completely directed at me, as a couple of her other friends had recently had kids as well, but I know it was partially because of my post.
Her thoughts were that people would use that information to steal a child’s identity… I get the concern, kind of, but for one, all of that information is public record. Birth certificates, marriage/divorce certificates, and death certificates can all easily be obtained by anyone, for anyone; a simple search online will give you a bunch of sites where you can obtain this information, so posting a name and birth date on Facebook to friends and family, isn’t going to make it any more likely that a child’s identity is stolen. It’s paranoia like that, that makes me question how some people think sometimes. And also, it’s my kid… if I choose to make an announcement about the birth of my kid on Facebook, that’s my choice, just like it’s your choice to criticize people for it, which I respect, I just disagree with.
So anyways, privacy is a bit of a concern for me going forward with this site, so as I said, there won’t be pictures of my kid’s face, there won’t be pictures of other people’s faces, I may even just use the most ridiculous stock images I can find of other people’s kids and photoshop them to relate to my story, who knows. And I also won’t be using real names…for now anyways.
