Where Are the Baby Photos?

Many bloggers put every small detail of their baby’s life online in publicly accessible blogs. The detail which is published sometimes shocks me, because once something is published in an unprotected internet zone that can be read by a search bot, that site can forever be archived by the Internet Archive WayBack Machine.

The WayBack Machine doesn’t necessarily store all images. So if you do someday remove baby photos from your website’s server, chances are high that they won’t appear in the archive.

But all that text written describing intimate details of a child’s life will remain in the archive … and probably will be used against him or her in the child’s teenage years.

So, how do I share my new adventures of fatherhood with my family members and friends?

Facebook: One of the primary advantages of Facebook is that you can have a lot of control about what information other people are able to see. I am fairly careful about who is part of my friend list, so if I post a few baby pix in my Facebook album, and restrict the access to only my “friends” I am fairly confident that the pictures will remain private. At the very least, the images will not get scooped up into a third party archive.

Flickr: Although the photo sharing site has a fairly complex system of access control, it at least allows a lot of options. In my case, the only people who are part of my “family” contacts are actual family members. This has meant that I can upload tons of baby photos and know that only family members are looking at them.

YouTube: The video sharing site does have a similar friend system as Flickr, but since my YouTube account has no information that connects it to me, it is really no problem to upload a few videos of my baby to my YouTube account. By giving the video a very generic description, I am able to make sure that random searchers are unlikely to find it. If they do, I have been careful to only upload videos that don’t reveal any detail that identifies the baby. Also, as in Flickr’s case, I can monitor view statistics, and know that if the numbers remain in the low double digits that only family members have viewed it (certainly, I want to keep the view numbers below the 60 million mark).

My brother has a much tighter security system on his blog, and I will probably move to that when my baby gets older and looks more identifiable. Until then, the built in security features of Flickr, Facebook and YouTube are adequate, and have helped me share the excitement of having a new baby on my hands without also publishing his baby photos for all perpetuity.

Wednesday October 8, 2008