I respect the wishes of family who don’t want pics of their kids shared, but there is a weird dissonance between how they post provocative and compromising pictures of themselves all the time yet fret over the most mundane pics of their kids falling into the wrong hands.
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It’s probably different for people that have kids, but then again i have friends that don’t but still post very frequently. It doesn’t annoy me at all but i’m a more private person and i don’t think my life is all that interesting 
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Only one of my friends is a serial poster of what’s going on with her kids. The rest are either retirees who share a lot of jokes, or folks who enjoy posting about activities that reflect their areas of interest (travel, yoga, dance, concerts, fitness, etc.). I prefer to remain anonymous, but have to deal with people who take, post, and tag group pictures when we get together. That annoys me, but there’s nothing I can do to prevent it short of avoiding them IRL.
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Oh, absolutely. I don’t even hand over phone numbers from A to B without permission, even when I know that A and B are reasonably close and the only phone number my employer has is the one for the phone at my desk at work.
But the actual harm of these photos is rather minuscule. The far likelier danger is the harmless uncle who plays secret games with your kids.
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It is.
Even my uncle — whom I’m not close to but treats Facebook like it’s his job — screenshot a photo of my son after his birth and posted it for his 4,000 (!!!) Facebook friends to see with my son’s full name and place of birth within an hour after I had him.”
Unless that baby is a very fast learner, I can assure you it’s not gone far in one hour.
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Indeed, the article suggests that Facebook’s encouragament of bad human choices is perhaps a more serious privacy problem than the data-driven stuff. QED.
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That’s true until it isn’t and at that point it can be really hard to work backwards and clean up the effects. I’ll take an example from my life. A family member recently had to worry about threats from a local right wing nut job. Their child travels to friend’s houses and school on their own sometimes. We have every reason to believe that the person would gladly harm a child to have their desired outcomes. It took a few hours to scrub their own social media profiles of pictures that would make that process easier, but we’re a few weeks into cleaning up the identifiable pictures from friends and relatives. Two months ago the pictures and cute stories from grandma were completely innocuous. Now they keep people awake at night. A lot of people ask to maintain their children’s privacy because circumstances change and it is way easier to stop the posting up front than it is to clean up later should that become necessary.
I choose the material I post about myself because I’m the one who primarily lives with the consequences. Restricting photos of kids allows for the same idea.
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Facebook does, as far as i recall, ask if you want to add location data to your posted pictures. So its possible that a less savvy family member could inadvertently doxx your location with little effort if they don’t know to disable certain social features.
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Renée Zellweger in Bridget Jones’ Diary with Uncle Geoffery.
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/c753cea4-e8ef-4dfb-9872-453a11f08309
Every place I’ve ever worked has had lessons on how to not disclose company and/or state secrets over social media. Because guess what, nobody ever learns from these lessons. All it takes is someone pretending to be a cute 18-year-old girl on LinkedIn, saying “hi I’m interested in interning for your company… what’s it like” and one thing leads to another and boom there go the state secrets.
This is actually a form of child pornography. Innocent pictures of kids used in non-innocent contexts. For example, with sexually suggestive text, or mixed in with actual pornography. Pictures don’t have to be sexual for randos to skeeve out over them.
Come on, who doesn’t know their SSN cold, especially when they have to write it out every time they fill out tax paperwork, get a loan, etc. Mine is ###-##-####.
That’s weird. If you type your Social out, Discourse automatically replaces the numbers with # signs…
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Not that it needs to be said, but for the love of God don’t actually do this.
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So apparently at some point I must have clicked / enrolled in a free “online community” called NextDoor.com, tempted by the promise of access to hyper-local classified ads and news, etc., I don’t know, I don’t recall. Probably did not think about it much at the time.
Well, about a week ago, out of the blue they send me an email that looks like this (names have been changed obviously)
“Hi MQ! Joe Schmo, age 42, at 123 Main Street, phone number (123) 456-7890, is joining Nextdoor. Does this info look accurate to you? If you know Joe, click here to tell us more.”
Dunno, I’ve seen some pretty fast babies. Regardless, in this case it would seem the family member manually typed in the location (possibly a hospital) or did a check in. Unless it was a home birth, the family member did not reveal the home address of the family.
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