10mo ago

As the Internet Gets Scarier, More Parents Keep Their Kids’ Photos Offline

getpocket.com As the Internet Gets Scarier, More Parents Keep Their Kids’ Photos Offline

Parents are increasingly rethinking what it means to create an online footprint their child can’t actively consent to.

Here's a non-paywalled link to an article published in the Washington Post a few days ago. It's great to see this kind of thing getting some mainstream attention. Young children have not made an informed decision about whether they want their photos posted online.

90 comments

Interesting how there are so many mentions of people worried about AI and only sharing photos in closed groups on Instagram/Facebook. I'm not sure that's actually keeping the photos away from AI.
- I think a large part of their concern is AI-altered photos generated by an individual.
- Came here to say this. If you upload pictures to instagram, they are already being processed by Facebook ("Meta"). If you have an online backup of your photos Google/Apple cloud, then they are alredy being processed.
- The problem with posting pictures of kids in closed groups is that pervs will just join those groups because they have what they're looking for. You're basically making it easier for them.
  It's not that parents are afraid of their kids being part of a training set, though that is a bad thing in and of itself. It's more about all of these AI undressing app ads that are showing up on every social media site, showing just how much of a wild-west situation things currently are, and that this brand of sexual exploitation is in-demand.
  Predators are already automating the process so that certain Instagram models get the AI undressing treatment as soon as they upload an exploitable pic. Pretty trivial to do at scale with Instaloader, GroundingDINO, SAM, and SD. Those pics are hosted outside of Instagram where victims have no power to undo the damage. Kids will get sexually exploited in this process, incidentally or intentionally.
  
  I believe by closed groups they mean the family or friends chat with like 5 people.
  Although I personally wouldn't share too much in those groups too.

As the internet gets scarier
How the fuck is the internet getting scarier? This isn't the random gore and porn filled, go to a forum and immediately get targeted by a sex-predator, internet that I grew up with. The internet is a corporate walled garden of mega services that feed disinformation and bullshit to people, but your odds of getting genuinely victimized as a child are so much lower than they used to be.
- I think it is just a different scary. It is less predators snatching you up in their white van and more social media is totally screwing with people's heads. It is more addictive than ever before. People are have para social relationships with online personalities. All photos you see online have been edited and changed to make them look better. Creating huge body image issues. And that is just the stuff I can think of off the top of my head.
  And the preditor in the white van hasn't actually gone away. Their have been some very questionables things over the years that have gotten some news coverage. Spiderman and Elisa shit, some very very questionable Musicly/TikTok video with kids, I have heard about some kids doing ASMR videos. Minecraft YouTubers seem to always end up grooming some kids.
  Bottom line the Internet be scary. Stay safe and definitely don't let kids be unattended.
- Lol, no. Very accessible AI tools can make the pictured kids do whatever the fuck the creator wants. It's easier than ever to steal identities and ruin lives. The internet still is full of porn and gore but that hardly is the problem. Also, brainwashing via social media is a really big and scary problem. The internet absolutely is scarier then aver before.
  
  This applies to adults too though. Should we outlaw posting any pictures of anybody online, just because AI exists? I don't think so...
- IMO the "getting scarier" is the swinging back part. Grew up in the same time, my parents were big on "No identifying information to anyone on the internet!" I joke with them now that their generation, the ones that told us to stay off post all their business on facebook and the like.
  But that's the thing, you have a small segment of society that was the internet nerds that didn't trust anything on the internet, hid themselves and the like, but now like you say it's the corporate walled garden that's sanitized and happy, which makes that veneer of trust. And boy do people trust it, posting anything and everything.
  Odds are lower in percentages of being genuinely victimized as a child, but the lack of paying attention what's posted has lead to a lot of effects, so people are getting worried again.
- Yes it's much less scary now, and also a bit shit. People are more scared, maybe, but that's not really indicative of reality.
- Those where more, how should I put it, 'visual' and 'tangible' threads. Now it's watch out or someone is aggregating all your infornation about you and will use it for some neferarious things...
  Which I find is a much wider issue, but is also much more dificult to warn and protect.
- It's not, it's just that with enough mainstream media coverage about scary internet stories normies are slowly waking up to what the internet is and how you should conduct yourself on it. Of course any terminally online person could have told you that 20 years ago but those are not most people. Hell even if you do know better good luck convincing your family, I know I tried for years with negligible results other than one of them now using a password manager.

I really hope it becomes the new normal to stop posting everything about ourselves non-anonymously online in general. But especially photos and information about kids. I am hopeful that in the near future, we'll all look back and say "What the fuck were we thinking? We all looked like narcissists exploiting our kids for likes!"
- Growing up at the dawn of the internet, this was considered normal. You stay anonymous online because you don’t know who the person on the other end of the screen is. What changed?
  
  Normies got in and big Internet knew they could make money by having everyone give up all private information.
- It's crazy to me for many of the people in my demographic consider it totally normal to have all of your online social interactions tied to the same persona/user, using your real name, face, locale, employment status, etc
  
  Stuff people do online is potentially public forever. WCGW?
- There's plenty of reasons to want to share images of your offspring besides chasing internet clout, and I find that simplification ignores all but the narcisistic fame chasers that will never care anyway.
  Not making any judgement on whether any other reason is particularly valid. Just saying that the people who do it for likes are never going to see it as anything negative or exploitative. Better off talking with or working to stop the people oversharing for other reasons. Higher chance of success.
  
  There's plenty of reasons to want to share images of your offspribg besides chasing internet clout.
  ... I can only think of one, sharing photos with your family and a few select friends.
  What other reasons are there?
  
  Still telling the fame chasers about the concerns is important as well even if it's much less efficient

My friends keep my photos offline too.
Anything that's genuinely good, is good in more ways than just "for the children".

My mama taught me back in the day to never use your real name online. Now, multiple decades later, I laugh at people who are my age and just now learning that lesson.
- Anything with your name on it should be very controlled and curated. Anything you said 10 years ago can and likely will be used against you.

On the flip side, search for "mom run" or "parent run" on Instagram to see the kids whose parents have decided to parade in front of thousands of people online. Usually moms posting their little girls in leotards and swimsuits for their mostly mostly adult male followers... 🤢🤮
But don't worry, Meta isn't complicit, if you search "child model" they give you a scary child abuse warning message.
Someone else on Lemmy pointed this out a while back, and after seeing it for myself that firmly solidified my decision to stay the fuck away from anything Meta does.
- It's weird the parents that are complicit in this, like how do they justify it in their mind? I had a girlfriend in high school whose mom encouraged her to post risque photos online in 8th grade, taking photos of her with her thong out posing seductively etc, she wanted her daughter to be hot. Maybe the parents are trying to relive their youth vicariously.
  But you are right, worse than the random parents encouraging this, the platforms knowingly encourage this sexualization of children because they know the ad revenue it can generate.
  
  I highly recommend reading "I'm Glad My Mom Died" by Jennette McCurdy, and watching the "Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV" Docu-series. It really helped me understand the mentality of parents like this and what they personally want out of it. "Reliving their youth vicariously" is a pretty good summary, along with the belief that making their kids famous will guarantee them a bright future.
  But it absolutely exposes children to exploitation and abuse, and sometimes the abuse can be quite extreme.
- Why "run"?
  
  Run as in "mom runs this account".
  "Mom managed" also gets results.
- I don't know whether to upvote or downvote.
  I wouldn't want the wrong kind of attention drawn here.
  But I think if people have FB accounts that should look for this and report the fuck out of it.
  
  I too am conflicted about having posted this info, but these accounts are already getting plenty of attention. Some have over 100k followers. I figure it's better that people know how this works so they can oppose it, even if it risks helping a few new unsavory people to seek these kinds of accounts out.
  I've tried my options at informing Meta about this issue, and unsurprisingly it is completely impossible to establish any meaningful contact with a company like this.

I recently found out about Circles and was hoping to migrate friends and family to it, but it's just too much of a learning curve to get things set up.
- That looks cool, I hadn't heard of Circles before. I want to check it out now. I'm curious if it somehow keeps your data private from the server owner. That feels like the missing feature in most federated, privacy-focused social networks.
  Side note: looks like it's made by Futo; I hadn't realized they were working on something like that. I've been using another one of their apps, Grayjay for almost all of my mobile Youtube viewing lately. It works great.
  
  I read through their EULA the other day, and it seems everything is E2EE so only the recipients can see the data, but they do have access to some stuff such as last login, usernames, etc.
  I have a few friends using it, and it's nice once you get it going, but adding/ finding friends is a bit of a headache in my experience
  
  If it is made by anyone associated with Grayjay then I'm out
- But, how are they making their revenue?
  
  they charge $3 per month for 10GB of storage
  
  I wonder the same

Still on iCloud, Google Drive and OneDrive. No way these people know how to store photos offline on their phone.
- I think it would be cool if there was more products that allowed this

Here in Belgium it's been pretty much the norm, both in friends groups or in institutions like schools that ask more formally, that one does not post photos online without the consent of all participants, including that of kids and their guardians. This is particularly the case for sharing publicly e.g Facebook post but also WhatsApp group.
It's a mess but habits are changing at scale.

Storing offline is great and all, but I hope everyone is storing on multiple disks at multiple locations....
Yer didn't think so, I'm sure photos are being lost.
- Everyone loses data once before they understand how important backups are.
  
  If only that happening once was enough to learn from our mistakes.
  
  For some of my acquaintances, uploading to facebook or sending them through whatsapp counts as backing up their pictures.

I share via Signal, and with links to my Immich instance (sent over Signal). Certainly susceptible to security problems since yours truly set it up, but what you gonna do...

At our place we only share photos of the kids with grandparents/aunts/uncles via group chat. They’re the only group that “necessarily” needs to see the kids.
- Let me guess, the group chat is WhatsApp or iMessage, so Facebook or Apple gets to see them too.
  
  Not even close—it’s Skype! We aren’t able to teach a 98yo great grandma to use something else from overseas, so Microsoft gets the cake.

Is the internet scarier?
Or is it just millennials and "internet natives" having kids and more of them knowing better what the internet actually is.
I tell people to imagine a public place with everyone in it, the majority wearing masks or costumes. With constantly recording surveillance. Do you take off your mask.
Sure the mask is not perfect protection, and there are areas off to the side where people seem to not be wearing masks. But go ahead and choose a way to keep your kids safe.

Managing digital photos is quite hard to do reliably.
Where do you store them? Optical disc, it might get mushrooms; HDD, mechanism might fail; SSD or flash, this one's better but it might get corrupted, and so on.
Cloud services provide a convenient solution to all this, than apart from the service going down (which is less likely) have no other issues. You can also access them wherever you are.
Privacy is an important concern. It would be nice to have them encrypted on cloud. Encrypted from a local and trusted (open source) client, that is also convenient. If each time I want to show a photo to my granny I have to download and gpg a file manually, I pass.
But most people don't care about their privacy at all anyways, so why bother.
- If you don't care about privacy, you're probably blasé about backup, but if you have backups it's as simple as 3-2-1...
- Encryption can brute forced
  
  Of course it can. Go brute-force a quantum resistant algorithm with a reasonably sized encryption key and call me when you're done.
- Just do backups, isn't that easier than using a cloud service?
  
  Sounds easy.
  To make local backups I have to do them on schedule, transfer all photos (or rsync them) from all devices to backup media. To have some redundancy I have to make a copy (unless you got a RAID NAS at home that is). In this situation you'll have a backup as recent as your sync frequency. To access the backups you have to browse the files on the drive, if it's a NAS, it can be quite convenient, but not if it's any other kind of storage.
  Compare this to for example Google Photos backup. You take a photo, you have Internet connection, it's synchronized. You don't worry about redundancy, and can access the photo wherever you are with a very nice app.
- Optical disc, it might get mushrooms
  Um... what?
  
  Syncthing!
  Android Phone/Linux/Windows/Mac/iOS clients. Simply sync your photos to all of your devices, if you only have the one device, use a trusted friend and cross sync....
  Don't bother with cloud.
  Also Signal groups for sharing with those that matter.
  
  I think they mean

For those who don't want to use "Pocket"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/parenting/2024/04/08/parenting-keeping-kids-offline/
- What's wrong with Pocket?
  
  Not great for privacy

I use 23Snaps. Gated social sharing among your contacts.
- Yes, closed-source, unencrypted and hosted by a party you can "trust". Anyone can write that they are a parent and care for your privacy.
  Anti Commercial-AI license