Back to things

A intense year of finishing my writing and managing movement from many different systems has prevented me from doing much writing.

Thinking about Privacy

To begin with I decided to talk a little bit about privacy and social media. Too many times we take people's personal privacy for granted because using technology is so easy to do. When we post a picture on facebook of our child, we don't take a moment to think what about the other children in the picture, are the parents ok with it? We don't think about who can see that picture. As a parent, you might be ok with publicizing the picture to the whole world to see, but the other parents might not. Your child might look great, but there might be something mortifying in the background that you just notice. The types of pictures that are posted online differ and the captions or tags that are posted also differ. One parent may decide to tag every child without thinking about the potential of predator who might encounter that picture and then be able to identify kids if they ran into them on the street.
 
What about the naked baby picture that we post online. We want to share a cute bath time photo, but in some cases today it's being argued that is child pornography.

Another complication to this is teachers and staff who post pictures of their students. They are excited to share their "portfolio" in a sense of what's going on in the classroom, but in many cases forget to ask the permission of their students' parents.

While privacy is something that many do not think about when posting pictures, there are also many advantages to the technology. Today we can share more pictures with many more people and keep them apprised of what is going on in real time.