NEW YORK â Behold the cascade of baby photos, the flood of funny kid anecdotes and the steady stream of school milestones on Facebook.
It all makes Sonia Rao, a stay-at-home mother of a 1-year-old in Mountain View, California, âa little uncomfortable.â
âI just have a vague discomfort having her photograph out there for anyone to look at,â says Rao. âWhen you meet a new person and go to their account, you can look them up, look at photos, videos, know that they are traveling.â
At a time when just about everyone and their mother â father, grandmother and aunt â is intent on publicizing the newest generationâs early years on social media sites, an increasing number of parents like Rao are bucking the trend by consciously keeping their childrenâs photos, names and entire identities off the Internet.
Reasons for the baby blackout vary. Some parents have privacy and safety concerns. Others worry about what companies might do with their childâs image and personal data. Some simply do it out of respect for their kidsâ autonomy before they are old enough to make decisions for themselves.
âI have a no tolerance policy,â says Scott Steinberg, a St. Louis-based business and technology consultant who has more than 4,800 Facebook friends. Steinberg says he shares no photos, videos or any information about his child.
âIf I donât want somebody to know about my child, to take an active interest in them, to recognize them in a city street or as they are leaving the schoolyard, the easiest way to do that is to not have any identifying information out about them,â he says.
As for Rao, she says she is otherwise active on Facebook, and even had an Instagram account for her dog before the baby was born. Sheâs happy posting photos of the canine, but not the many snapshots of her daughter and the dog together âno matter how cute they are. Rao does share baby pictures, via email or text, but only with close friends and family.
Facebook, for its part, encourages parents to use the siteâs privacy setting if they want to limit who can see their baby photos and other posts. Itâs possible, for example, to create a group of close friends and relatives to share kid updates with. But thatâs not enough for some users.
New parents Josh Furman and his wife, Alisha Klapholz, are âvery protectiveâ of their newborn. The Silver Spring, Maryland couple believes itâs in their daughterâs best interest to limit her Internet presence for as long as possible. As such, they havenât posted her legal name on Facebook and donât post photos of her on the site. Instead, they share her Hebrew name and also came up with a nickname to use just on Facebook. They ask friends and family to do the same.
âIn 2014 we sort of feel like the repercussions of sharing private data are totally unpredictable,â says Furman, a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Maryland.
Like his wife, Furman is very active on Facebook. Even so, he says âour child isnât capable of making decisions about what details of her life sheâd like to share or not.â So they are waiting until she can.
A big reason parents are wary, even if they use social media sites themselves, is that the companies âhave not been very transparent about the way they collect data about users,â says Caroline Knorr, parenting editor at the nonprofit Common Sense Media, which studies childrenâs use of technology. âFacebookâs terms of service and privacy (policies) â no one reads it, itâs too obscure.â
Some parents look back to their own childhoods, when they were able to make mistakes without evidence of those blunders living on âforeverâ online.
âI had the choice of what I wanted to reveal publicly,â says Wasim Ahmad, journalism professor at Stonybrook University and father of a newborn son. âIâd like to, as much as I can, retain the possibility of choice for him.â
Two days after his son was born, Ahmad bought the website domain with his sonâs name.
âIâm going to make it a private website with a password so family can log inâ to see updates, he says. âWhen he gets old enough, Iâll probably give him the keys.â
The parents hasten to make clear that they have no problems with other people who post their own baby photos.
âMany of our close friends put up photos of their kids and we love seeing them,â says Furman. âThis is just a decision that we made for our child, and people have been respectful.â
People have shared baby photos since the dawn of the camera, and stories about kidâs shenanigans long before that. Parents who decide to keep photos of their children and other data off social media say they still want to share those things, but they are bothered by the idea of online permanence.
âI think my parents told embarrassing stories about me as a child at cocktail parties, no doubt. But those canât be brought back up now â or if they are, itâs to a small audience and not the whole world,â says Amy Heinz, who regularly shares anecdotes about her three children on her blog, usingourwords.com.
To protect the privacy of her children, she refers to them in blogs by nicknames â Big, Little and Pink. At first, she didnât use photos of their faces, but sheâs eased up.
âI am always conscious that what Iâm posting is affecting more than myself,â she says.
Parents who enforce strict blackout rules are still very much in the minority. In a 2011 survey, 66 percent of Generation X parents (people born in the 1960s and â70s) said they post photos of their children online, while more than half said they have shared news about a childâs accomplishment online. The poll was part of the Longitudinal Study of American Youth at the University of Michiganâs Institute for Social Research.
Aisha Sultan, a fellow at the institute when the poll was conducted, thinks the results might be different if the same questions were posed to respondents today.
âBack (then) there wasnât a lot of conversation about this,â says Sultan, who is a nationally syndicated parenting advice columnist at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. âWhen parents first started joining Facebook in large numbers it wasnât the primary concern. We felt like we were in control of information we were sharing with friends and family.â
Facebookâs privacy blunders over the years, not to mention frequent updates to its confusing privacy policies, changed all that. Now, Sultan says, parents are much more aware of the little control they have over their personal data online.
Lawmakers have begun to pay some attention to the issue, too. A new California law requires online services, websites or apps that collect personally identifiable information to remove content that minors have posted, if requested. The measure goes into effect next year.
âItâs a good start, but I donât think it replaces a lot of parental conversation, regulation and oversight,â Sultan says.
She should know. Recently, her sister had a baby. Not thinking about it, Sultan posted a photo of her newborn niece on her Instagram account, which is locked and only includes close friends and family.
âI got in big trouble with my brother-in-law,â she says. âHe said⌠âPlease ask before you do that.â â
Copy the Story LinkSend questions/comments to the editors.
Success. Please wait for the page to reload. If the page does not reload within 5 seconds, please refresh the page.
Enter your email and password to access comments.
Hi, to comment on stories you must . This profile is in addition to your subscription and website login.
Already have a commenting profile? .
Invalid username/password.
Please check your email to confirm and complete your registration.
Only subscribers are eligible to post comments. Please subscribe or login first for digital access. Hereâs why.
Use the form below to reset your password. When you've submitted your account email, we will send an email with a reset code.