Why my wife and I decided not to share our son’s photos on public social media platforms

Photo by Pierre Bamin on Unsplash

Two years ago, after my son was born, my wife and I had the discussion: Do we want to put our son’s photos on social media? This was after the major data scandal with a popular social media site and a British political consoling firm. Needless to say, that scandal highlighted Andrew Lewis’ (aka blue_beattle) comment “If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.” (User-driven content on MetaFilter).

At the core of it, we were trying to answer several questions:

1. Do we want our son’s photos or data to be used for advertisement?
2. Do we want our son’s photos or data leaked to some third party where we have no control?
3. Do we want our son’s photos or data used in a way that we don’t want even if we tell the platform no?
4. How comfortable are we with his photos or data being open to the public?
5. Finally, is it fair for him that we build an online presence for him before he even knows what that means?

After a quick 5 minute discussion we decided: No. It would not be fair to him.

The social media companies that are free scrap your data to better target you with ads and they are good at it; frighteningly so. They can gain some context out of your text and can understand the context of the photos and videos you post; where they were taken, what’s in the background, are you showing more than you should, how old you are, your sex, etc. This is all done through A.I. of course. Also, some platforms have been accused, with some evidence, of creating shadow profiles of people that did not sign up on their platform but that show up in photos or on people’s contact lists from their mobile phone. All this in the name of gathering data on you or others to sell to third parties. So while we can’t stop them from gathering information on our son, we can prolong it as long as we.

So what are the alternatives? How do you safely share your child’s life with friends and family?

I set out to answer that question. My criteria for a viable site were as follows:

1. It had to be private and invite-only.
2. It had to be secure; if someone got ahold of the URL to a photo, they would be denied access unless they were invited in.
3. It had to be collaborative so my wife and I could contribute photos of my son to the same space.
4. It needed to be intuitive so grandparents wouldn’t have too hard of time using it.
5. It had to be interactive; people should be able to comment on the photos.
6. The site needed to be transparent on how they were making capital; if it was free, then I knew the data was theirs to sell.

It’s not a big list, but it’s enough to disqualify all of the websites I researched. #4 and #6 were by far the hardest meet. I signed up for more sites than I can remember; sites that are well known to sites that were down on page 10 and page 12 of the search engine. I played around with the site and even spent hours dissecting their Terms and Privacy documents.

One well-known site and photo cloud platform would make the photo URLs public for you to share them.

Another site was collaborative, but wouldn’t disclose how they made capital and hinted at selling data in their Terms and Conditions.

Almost all the sites were free and not transparent on how they were using the data or how they made the capital.

After weeks of looking I couldn’t find a good solution. So I started thinking, well if I can’t find it maybe I should build it. We can’t be the only ones that are concerned about this. I took another few weeks to start talking to people and see what they thought. I talked to friends, family, neighbors, random people at the store. I found a good portion of the people who didn’t care and posted their kid’s photos; a few people who were surprised by what information these companies could gather. Some felt the same way and some were not concerned about security, but they didn’t want their kid’s photos showing up alongside some political, controversial posts or advertisements. It didn’t look like the market was big but it looked like enough people were looking for alternatives.

I decided to get that alternative out there and see what the market thinks. Now my wife and I are using the platform I built, inspired by my son, Photoprivy to share his photos with friends and family. My goal is to answer all the questions above and give people a safe place to share their photos with friends and family.

To the parents out there that don’t share their kid’s photos on popular websites, what have you been doing? I would love to hear from you.