“Do I have privacy?” — Jane, 1 years old
As I grow up, I started hearing about news that friends of mine are getting married and are having babies. When I checked the photos of the babies that my friends posted on Instagram or Facebook, sometimes I couldn’t believe that my friends have children and felt so happy for them at the same time.
“Can I post a picture of us?” — My Facebook friends, older than 20 years old
As the Facebook social media service has become the main platform where my friends and I use, they, also and I, started posting and sharing a lot of photos of us. At some point, when privacy issue about posting photos has been getting a lot of attention, they started asking each other if they are okay to share the photos on Facebook before they posted them because someone might not want to be exposed to the online platform. I think that that is the time when I started getting interested in online privacy issues.
“Hi all! I was just born!” — an 1-year-old kid(‘s parents)
These days, my friends who just became parents of a newborn baby started posting their baby’s daily life photos. Of course, they are really cute and adorable. However, on the one hand, I also was picturing how the ‘babies’ are going to react to the postings 15 years later. Either the Instagram (or Facebook) service would stop their business anymore and then they just have no idea what happened 15 years ago or maybe they would question their parents why they uploaded their pictures 15 years ago.
The Modern Day Baby Book
While I was looking for articles or papers related to this topic, I came across the paper, The Modern Day Baby Book: Enacting Good Mothering and Stewarding Privacy on Facebook [1]. The authors of this paper argues that parents could get benefits of having the reputation of ‘good mothering’ when they post their smiling, adorable, and cute baby pictures, and but they also should be responsible for this because they are taking the risk of their baby’s privacy. Apparently, this is not only my concern! Now that the social media services have become popular only since around 15 years ago, maybe it is too early to bring up this topic for people to care about it. However, I believe that it is never too early to think about such a (potentially) important issue in the near future.
[1] Priya Kumar and Sarita Schoenebeck. 2015. The Modern Day Baby Book: Enacting Good Mothering and Stewarding Privacy on Facebook. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW ‘15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1302–1312. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2675133.2675149
